Nostalgia for the 1970s
May 31, 2007
I must be getting old. I’ve become nostalgic for the 1970s.
I hated the 1970s when I lived through them, disappointed I guess that the 1960s had ended, and most Americans I knew had turned out to be the creeps we hippies hated, included hippies I used to know.
My family used to look back, too, thinking that the 1930s and 1940s were the panacea of morality when they could point to Hitler and his kind as the ultimate evil.
Such is the delusion of each generation, thinking that some previous time possesses the moral fabric that has come threadbare in the present.
In truth, people were creeps are creeps and will likely be creeps for the most part, and that somewhere in cracks of civilized life, decent people hide to survive.
My delusion blames abortion for making this time more pathetic than times of the past. Smart people kill off the next generation before birth; stupid people spread their genes around populating the planet with misconceptions like the Christian concept of creation.
It isn’t the genes. It is the basic make up of humanity.
People -- nearly all people -- want to be superior to other people, more important, wealthier, or more significant.
In this aspect, Jefferson and Franklin missed the boat, presuming that people wanted equality, and that provided with the same amount of land and wealth, all people could get along with working this land.
Most of us don’t want to work, nor are we happy with living in a house that looks like our neighbors. We want people to do our labor for us, call us boss, and thank us for our abusing them.
This is the great flaw in Communism, which strived to force equality on human nature.
Human greed was bound to rebel, especially when people saw the so-called masters of the communist state living and acting just like their capitalistic counter parts, arrogant asses with a superiority complex.
In the west, we shape the illusion of superiority -- each person gets sold with the idea that they are better than everybody else, and somehow we make it work without too many people picking up a gun to shoot his or her arrogant neighbor for being such an asshole.
Me, I keep pretending things were better in the 1970s, when I know things really weren’t. We just had fewer people therefore fewer assholes to deal with on the roads every day.
And maybe that’s the problem.
Just too many people crowded onto a too small planet.
But I suspect, the universe wouldn’t be large enough since humanity would just keep breeding assholes until we filled that up, too.