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Showing Original Post only (View all)America's current situation is just chickens from the '80s coming home to roost [View all]
For years, my wife and I have entertained a friendly disagreement. She looks back on the 1980s fondly while I revile them. Her feelings are steeped in the delusion of nostalgia, a perception of carefree youth and music to which she still clings.
Aside from hating most of the Big '80s' pop music and recalling all the personal heights and nadirs of the time, my distaste is based in what I saw happening to my nation then. The burst in materialism, the worship of greed, the demonization of unions, government and the New Deal, the greater marriage of fundamentalist religion with politics, the rationalization of bigotry, the Reagan era was undergirded by dangerous trends I recognized as detrimental to the health of our nation. When radio and TV began to crackle with a livid and hate-filled kind of programming, I feared for America's future.
Few personalities from that era embodied the superficiality and avarice like Donald Trump. The upstart braggart and self-absorbed huckster deserves the mantle of the 1980s as much as the 40th POTUS. Reagan might have lent his veneer to the decade, but Trump was its essence.
Now all these years later, we live with the fruit it has borne. Reagan's obvious flaws were ignored as he was canonized. We allowed politics to become even more entangled with right-wing religion, aiding in the rise of reactionary bodies like the Tea Party. We have open propaganda networks operating across our airwaves. The tax base has all but disappeared and corporate control of politicians at all levels is as tight as it has ever been.
The GOP's rightward nosedive even pulled portions of the Democratic Party with it, with welfare reform, crime bills, telecommunications consolidation and healthcare reform taking their cues from previously conservative policies and positions.
So the next time someone waxes wistful about "the good ol' '80s" ask them to look around us and take it in. Point to our crumbling infrastructure, to our ballooning debt, to our military gravesites, to our divided society, to our widening wealth gap, to gated communities and disheveled public schools, to our moronic and fantastically corrupted chief executive, to our deteriorating biosphere and tell them to thank the '80s for all of it.