How We Got What We Have

I found this in NAT's Boiler Room of all places!  I am watching right now while I type this blog.  It's a series by Inland Steel called In Our Hands.  The first of the series is named "How We Got What We Have."

I would encourage everyone to watch this.  It reminds me how I was raised and how far our society has wandered from these basic principles.  How in the world did we get here?  You can blame the 60's, you can blame drugs, you can blame the pill.  It was all personal choice, just like the Romans did 2,000 years ago.

I am getting old enough I miss the way things were when I was a kid.  Technology is great and less physical labor is nice but now people spend more time in the gym and the psychiatrist's office then grandpa did in the field.  It just doesn't make sense.  Just look how people responded to this film!

"We have come to accept this acrid, pessimistic climate as a fact of life. But it wasn't always. That's one of the reasons that so many Americans of a certain age look back with yearning to the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

He endures in memory not only as a president but as a symbol of a time of comparative unity, hope and confidence. His assassination was a tragedy, but it was also a harbinger. What lay ahead, as Americans now know, was an unraveling of our civic fabric, which has not been and may never be restored.

In 1958, when asked if they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of them time, 73 percent of Americans said they did. Today the figure is just 19 percent. When Kennedy called on his fellow citizens to ask what they could do for their country, they were inclined to take him seriously. Political leaders no longer make such requests because they know what sort of reception they would get.

What was so different about that era? One reason for the general assumption that the government was capable of overcoming big challenges was recent experience of it doing just that."

That was a poor assumption.  We should have never let government get so big or depend on it so much.  We could argue our misgivings until the cows came home but it wouldn't change a thing, would it?

I found the old films interesting and hope you do too.  I sure want my grandkids to read this someday when I am long gone.  I will do all I can to help them until then.

Ed Winkle