How I see it...

My ability to keep up with the political drama has significantly decreased, considering I don't have 8 hours of mindless droning in a classroom to try to fill the time with. Class of 2020, yippee. With all the left and right fighting and screaming, and the world willing to tear itself apart for the sake of a superior ideology, with Americans becoming more and more ignorant and passive, and politicians becoming more and more radical, the year 2020 has seen it all. I was awake the morning of the first day of 2020 when at 3 am, the hashtag #DeathToAmerica was trending, and Islamic fundamentalists were rioting at the embassy, I remember watching ABC news at school about the primaries and the slow development of COVID-19, I've been watching 2020 under a very precise microscope, and frankly, can't say that I'm surprised. Its everyone's fault in my opinion. The politicians for using positions of power to disrupt our civil society and its processes, the media turning a blind eye to anything they feel doesn't fit there agenda. And the Peoples fault for not giving a damn.

I honestly have lost most of my faith in our society.
God help us.

 

Hey CB.... Keep your chin up. I can’t stand seeing you this way. You are the light of our future. It’s young folks like you that remind me that tomorrow is worth looking forward to.

@JohnHamilton has a wealth of historic knowledge and hopefully he can fill in what I am lacking here. But there have other been times in our history where the division seemed too far to come back from. I was a kid in the late sixties and even I could tell the nation was ripping itself apart. We survived it.

Hell yes.... There are too many uncompromising and intolerant belligerent extremists in the world today. You see, with the advent of the internet we gave everyone a soapbox. And by golly everyone has something to say and be damned with anyone else.... But see the web is still new. We haven’t learned quite yet just how to tame it. You should look up and see how many people were killed by the new horseless carriages that were on the dirt roads of the day. Automobiles were new a hundred years ago. We didn’t have traffic laws or traffic cops. We got a handle on it and got it under control. The web is still new. We will grow with it and learn to compromise. The good always triumphs in the end.

CB, keep your chin up man. You are the bright light of tomorrow. And you are a darned sharp young man. Rise up to the challenge and make your world a better place.

 

There is a lot to be discouraged about right now. I wish I could say things will get better soon. I wouldn't buy into the happy talk that is going around right now. It will only make you crash harder the next time.

That doesn't mean that you should give up on all hope. Things will eventually get better. They may get worse before that happens but buying into the hopelessness is a recipe for depression and anxiety.

The way I get through tough times is to realize that many people have overcome a lot worse than I have had to endure and they survived. Helping others a great way to overcome the doom and gloom. Volunteer someplace and find out how bad others have it.

This will pass. You will prosper. Life will go on.

 

Thanks, I would note that I really don't consider this to be about me, I have a solid future ahead of me, the only problem is that society as a whole is on a collision course. I'm enlisting in the U.S Army, but I ask myself sometimes, am I volunteering to serve and protect a nation of people who are destroying themselves? Is the potential downfall of our Political System and Constitution coming from within, rather than an enemy?
I'm not implying that our country will collapse physically, I'm worried about the core of our nation, our republic, being dismantled. The perpetrators chip away piece by piece, while the others turn a blind eye.

 

That's what I like to see in our youth CB . . . realistic perspective, and a keen awareness of what is going on around them.

Unfortunately, the talking heads are so much easier to watch that most of our youth (yourself excluded) passively absorb their garbage, nod in unison, and blindly defer to their agenda.

Yes, we are threatened, but it will be the active thinkers of our time, many like yourself, who will wrest the tiller from those who would change this nation, rather then go live in another that befits their vision.

 

I get the idea that being vague about who is causing this "potential downfall" is intentional. Maybe you don't want to start another Right vs Left argument. Or maybe you blame both sides.

I only know that I see many of our governmental institutions being dismantled as you do. Some cheer it on and others see it as a sign of democracy collapsing, a slide into authoritarianism. The perpetrators and those that turn a blind eye to current events are two sides of that same coin. History has seen this before. This is nothing new. I won't define or name the past participants because it wouldn't matter. Every soldier in every army throughout history believed that they we on the side of right and the other side was in the wrong. No one fights a war believing that they are wrong. The winners write the history books. Few soldiers read them.

One young man, not much older than you, said, “America is unique among wealthy nations in its ability to combat serious problems. From gun violence to pandemic response, we look like a failed state. One of our political parties conceives of this breakdown as freedom.”

 

Interesting, is it not, that the young man chose not to write,"From the infringement upon our right to self-determination, to widespread nanny-state meddling, we are failing our people. One of our parties conceives of this socialist breakdown of freedom as the linchpin of its ascendance to permanent power."

 

I suppose that was because he was looking more at the fact that we have more gun deaths than any other country on the planet and are screaming ahead of all other countries in COVID-19 positive cases and deaths and not all that much at the suppositional ideologies of the right-wing extremists.

 

Fellows.... He is a young man that has just been robbed of a graduation. He has obviously been brought up as a respectful and thoughtful young man. Us old guys are supposed to be in control.... Showing him some pathway to succeed in this harsh old world. And all he sees is petty bickering from us as well as his nations leaders. He needs reassurance right now that we aren't going to flub this whole thing up before he has a chance to build his own life.

 

He seems pretty self-confident about his future. I am not worried about him as he has indicated that he is fine.

 

A petty response on your part, don't you think.

His expressed concern is all about the lack of civility and cooperation between statesmen who should be acting in the national interest of preserving our traditional values, rather than in the interest of elevating their respective political parties.

Our political discourse has devolved into little more than a schoolyard squabble over whether the last swing was a fair or foul ball . . . recess will be over before the game is finished . . . we'll all lose.

 

Look who our school yard bully president is and you can figure out why we are where we are. Calling people silly childish names constantly. Bullying people on social media. Dividing the country along party lines at every turn. If anyone has lowered the civility of public discourse, it can't be denied that your fearless leader had been the driving force. I know you won't acknowledge it but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't see it.

Yes we will all lose. Thank you for your support of the decline.

 

And look at what has come out about what the FBI and Justice Department were up to for the last three and half years. In sworn testimony before Adam Schiff’s House Committee, the participants in the Russian hoax scandal admitted that there was no Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Yet, when these same people came on CNN and MSNBC, they said that there was.

Why did they say there wasn’t any collusion before the House committee? The reason is they could have gone to jail for lying under oath to Congress. They can lie all they want on television.

It’s very troubling when the top officials in our nation’s law enforcement agencies get involved in elections, when there was no criminal activity, and they do so for strictly partisan reasons. Those are some very serious steps toward ending with a police state.

Yes, Trump has not been civil, but it's hard to be civil to people who are making up stuff to get you. If the Democrats had acted like adults and accepted the loss in 2016, things might have been very different now.

 

You beat me to it JH. Not only was Obama's administration busy undermining the right, but also the right thing to do. That was the lowering of civil discourse and the divisiveness that JN should have referenced, but he will never acknowledge that.

The best the Democrat Party had to offer turned out to be lying to us the entire time. The left thinks their subterfuge is so clever that it evades detection, but they are so wrong. Their voters were not low-information voters . . . they were mis-informed voters led down the primrose path by the media, but soon will have their eyes wide open again and move closer to the center than they've been in decades.

A nightmare for the extreme liberals, to be sure. They've dug their own hole, and it's a deep one.

 

ABC News is yet to report the fact that the witnesses said one thing in the Adam Schiff committee room and another thing on TV. They had a total hissy fit when the charges against General Flynn were dropped. They blamed it on Barr and the Republicans.

I watch these fiction writers every night to see how they are spinning the news. That way I know what they up to and what their version of “the truth” is.

 

Actually, we were talking about political discourse but apparently that wasn't going so well for you so you changed the subject. You know, your typical move.

I'm not interested in the corruption in the Justice Dept topic in this thread. Start another one.

 

Assume that were all totally true, why would it move people center? I find quite the opposite to be true with millennials like myself.

 

I don't expect you to change your vote at all, @GeneWright. You are a socialist and will remain on the far left. You will vote for whomever the Democrats nominate or perhaps the Green Party or some other left of center party.

The only thing that you might consider is that it's not a good idea to have the chief Federal law enforcement officials using the powers of their office to prosecute people who don’t agree with their political views. They are there to enforce the law, not push political positions. To do otherwise is very dangerous to the health of our nation’s republic.

 

Well young Coin, as always happens with these threads, they get hijacked.

I'll just say that you aren't the first young man of his generation to feel the pain of realizing the world he is about to inherit is a mess. It's kind of a common story and all you have to do is look at the people from your parents generation arguing and fighting here while the world is in flames to know why it is so. You did however, remind me of another young man from my generation that saw what you are seeing today and much worse and said this about it.

 

Don't worry GW, he calls everybody a Socialist. It's like his boogeyman. Babaika!