Yanno, I blame a whole shitload of today's ills on Bush .... violence chief among them

It seems to me, now early in my seventieth decade on this Earth, that every time our economy goes to shit and our government ceases to even try to *appear* to serve the people, our social fabric is rent asunder.

Road rage and 'roid rage.

Increases in violent crime and cop killings.

Dog fights and cock fights.

Hatred for our fellow man - be they from Mecca or Mexico City.

Complete lack of respect in our daily discourses.

Video game violence and school shootings.

Car chases and cops overacting.

Child sexual predators and children serving adult sentences for heinous crimes.

Government for the Oil Royal, not for the sorry asses of the Masses.

The list is endless.

None of these things are necessarily interrelated or directly attributable to some specific policy of the Bushies. But it seems to me we saw similar crap in the early Seventies, when the economy sucked, housing interest rates were in the teens, gas prices out of control, the Summer of Love long ago turned to drug crazed nightmares, Viet Nam and racial strife and The Draft foremost in many people's minds.

That begat the Son of Sam and the Atlanta child murders and the Zodiac and Hillside Killers. We were outraged and fascinated at the same time. Our kids were scared shitless. Women were scared shitless. Patty Hurst. Black Panthers. Black Power. The hateful and reactionary Moral Majority. The news was filled with nothing good.

Look at the iconic words from back then:

Nixon

Watergate

Ford

The aftermath was overseen by, and the burden borne by, James Earl Carter, Jr. He healed by redirecting us to the needed pain we had to endure to recover.

If we want to, we could surely say that it is 1974 all over again, headed for 2009.

We've been here before. It was awful then.

It is worse now.

I am so much sadder today than I was back then.

And so VERY much more worried. God, it hurts to think about it sometimes.

It was awful then.

It is worse now.

So very much worse.

I hope to live a tenth that long.

I'm a very youthful Sixty.

. . . virtually everything you list there (with some obvious exceptions, such as video game violence) has been an attribute of the human condition for centuries.

...... you say:

" ..... has been an attribute of the human condition for centuries."

Had you said:

" ..... has been an attribute of the hopeless human condition for centuries."

I really dislike Bush, and I was early to that party. But, I have no trouble making the distinction between what is his faulth and that which is not.

Leadership really does have an affect. Were he, let's say, really compassionate instead of a campaign slogan, compassion may have been a national emotion.

Instead, we're more bellicose, including to each other. When we become desensitized, it becomes easier and more tolerable to hate and do hateful things.

And if you weren't around in the Nixon/Watergate/Viet Nam era, you perhaps can't quite understand this in a visceral way.

For all Reagan's ills, he didn't cause this kind of national psyche. Clinton never did.

Bush has.

and in my 46 years, I have never seen 6 and a half years change our nation (and the world) for the worse. I do think Bush's adminisration is a main culprit in the many ills we're experiencing. So yes, I buy a lot of your premise.

I can just feel it. This pent-up rage among so many of us and so many of our fellow Americans is gonna bust open. One way or another.

:grr:

I feel it,my friends feel it,people here feel it.I fear we have further to sink.

we can measure the pendulum's movement from the many excellent examples you cited. I see the underlying causality of all of those yardsticks as "hope." when most have it, things SEEM to get better. in the "good times", polls show that "people think the country is headed in the right direction." as we create economic opportunities for more people, there is a sense that things are improving. a wide array of social problems appear to get better.

but, even in the best of times, such progress, I'm afraid is illusory, or, perhaps more accurately, transitory. so, we might cite, for example, with a booming economy during the Clinton years, the murder rate declined.

this was, of course, preferable to the alternative. but we must keep our eye on the grape. a rising tide is not always just. while many may have been duped by a better economic climate, one cannot ignore the reality that the rich continued to get richer. one cannot ignore the reality that the Clinton years saw massive corporate welfare and policies that catered to the super-wealthy. it was a short jump off the cliff for that rising tide to recede because we have not codified and secured economic justice within our institutions.

as long as we are a government ruled by the rich and powerful, we will find ourselves beaten over the head by the fickle pendulum. yes, clearly bush's abuses have been the worst we've ever seen. clearly, he should be hanged for his treason. but, sadly, even post-bush, without a national awareness about our sustaining enemy, we truly cannot escape the pendulum's swing. in the end, we must see our enemy clearly and know that, like a cancer, that enemy has spread to every cell in the national corpus ... unfortunately, cutting out one offending organ will not heal us ...

In the end it's always personal responsibility,but the influence that a culture of "Might makes right" has seems undeniable to me.And that culture is personified by this gang of thugs.