Yet another story on this general theme. It’s about human nature, not the actual state of the world.
Vox, Bryan Walsh, today: The US is better off than it was in 1976. So why does it feel worse?, subtitled “America’s 250th birthday feels bleak. The numbers tell a different story.”
The current generation does not remember this.
America in the summer of 1976 was not in a good place.
The president who presided over the country’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford, only had the job because the previous president and vice president had resigned in disgrace, making him the sole US president who was never actually elected. The Vietnam War had ended in defeat and disgrace when Saigon fell the year before, after the deaths of nearly 60,000 American service members. Inflation hit double digits in 1974 and stayed ugly, unemployment sat near 8 percent, and economists had to invent a word — stagflation — for an economy that seemed to encompass the worst of both worlds.
Given all that, you might assume the national mood leading up to the 200th anniversary was grim. And, yet, on July 4, 1976, something strange happened: Americans threw themselves a hell of a party.
In New York Harbor, more than 200 tall ships sailed up the Hudson for Operation Sail, drawing an estimated six million spectators — the largest crowd in the city’s history. Ford reviewed the fleet from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. It was the same scene up and down the country that day: parades in small towns, fireworks over the National Mall, church bells ringing in unison at 2 o’clock. It was one cathartic day of celebration after a decade that had offered little reason for it.
Then.
Jump forward 50 years, to this year’s 250th anniversary, and you’ll find the vibes flipped. Roughly 60 percent of Americans tell pollsters the nation is on the wrong track. A majority say its best years are behind it. About three-quarters think today’s children will end up worse off than their parents. Asked a version of that same founding-ideals question from 1976, 77 percent now say the founders would be disappointed in what we’ve become.
With more charts and graphs about increased life expectancy, college graduates, the reduction of pollution, and the increase of family income. Somehow, this doesn’t register; most people today think everything is getting worse. This is a deep message about human nature and its inability to assess the real world. Throughout history, everyone thinks things are getting worse. Despite that, the human race is progressing.
The Americans crowding New York Harbor in 1976 were cheering a country that was sicker, dirtier, more dangerous, and less free than the one we live in now. But they were right to cheer; the line was already bending the right way, and it kept bending. It turns out a nation can travel a long way, even while it is convinced it is going nowhere.
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Listening to Alfred Schnittke.
