1976

You know, it was kind of a crappy year.

Vietnam had finished and the military was in limbo, crying like a whipped dog.  The economy was crap, the first oil crunch had taken a big bite out of the country.  The internet did not exist, ARPANET was not quite a year old and both Microsoft and Apple came into being.

The environment was an issue, Rachel Carson was still being read and mourned,  Paul Ehrlich was being roundly vilified for speaking the truth.  The climate had just made its first big move (the 1976 Shift) and the data was so new no one even noticed.  We had a caretaker President who handed the reins to a good man who tried to change things and who everyone despised for not telling them that they were special.  He appealed to the better angels of our nature and lost four years later to a man and culture that knew we didn't possess anything of the sort.

Our society was still flailing around after the silliness of the late sixties and early seventies.  The yuppies had not been born yet, you just had a bunch of 20-somethings with college degrees who had started the transition from budding hippies to yuppies with a mission to strip mine the country for everything that it was worth in order to feed their own cupidity.

History Rhymes

Our vaunted military is getting to be more and more broken.  Long wars do that to you.  The oil crunch this time is a different flavor, but still a symptom of the same problems.  The internet is now ubiquitous and its utility growing more suspect.  Microsoft and Apple are behemoths astride the landscape, but they are showing their age and their sclerosis.

The environment is worse now, having been ignored for forty some odd years.  We have a caretaker president who maintained the looting begun by Reagan and that continued through both Bushes and a Clinton.

But it will be a little different this time.  Unless something radical happens, whichever of the two idiots we elect will be a one-term wonder.  I think that there is a solid chance that neither of them will get all the way through one term, whether the cause be impeachment, violence, or indictment.  When both major party candidates have an unfavorable metric of greater than 50%, I think that we had better keep our expectations quite low.

So we are looking at the arc of history from the other end of where we were in 1976.  Part of me thinks that we are reaping our just rewards, but then I look at my sons and realize that they will be reaping what we sowed.