there hasn't been a decade yet

that hasn't had something wrong with it.

some seem to have been better, some seem to have been worse,
for how i saw the world, from the perspective of my own life.

while it is true that the 1960s was still in the era of mccarthyism and segregation, it was also,
in my then 12 year old eyes,
the beginning of hope for ending those two things,
and the beginning of a new frontier in outer space.

and jf kennidy, being the youngest president yet elected at that time
also brought hope and optimism.

hope a decade later proved to be not unfounded.
though of course the draft and the war in viet nam were still going on
and a bitter disappointment that they were.

man on the moon, school desegregation, woodstock, were all good things,
that gave root to what was to come in the 70s;
solid state electronics, the music and personal computer,
long hair, and imaginative design in architecture.

 

the 1380s were beyond reproach.

 

you been there lately? might have been ok in some parts of the western hemisphere that were mutually ignorant of europe though.
probably ok in nepal or tibet too, but i wouldn't bet on it. maybe some parts of sub-saharan africa.

 

before greek and roman empiries, most people in most places walked in harmony with their natural surroundings.

after rome fell, christianity kept europe in ignorance and poverty for more then a thousand years.

then islam arrived, and out of that clash of cultures, people were liberated from their fear and hatred of logic and science.

and from that grew the industrial revolution, which brought us to where we are to day.

and where we are today, is the dawning realization, that if we don't learn once again to walk in harmony with nature,
(and we do have ways of doing this without having to give up what there are of good things we have gained)
we will destroy not only our so called civilization by refusing, but at the very least, come within an inch, of our entire species becoming extinct.

 

it's been a few years.

 

actrually i think 1830 would have been pretty cool, if there weren't any more people then there had been in 1730 and didn't start being.
when population was that small, anything that worked wasn't going to screw everything up like it is now.

steam powered space ships with vacuum tube electroncs. lol. and jacobs ladders and big scary high voltage knife switches.
and igor with an eye and abby normal.

thing is, you don't have to burn down all the forests and surround ourselves with vast wastelands of concrete and pavement
to play with model trains or make things with electric drills and even 3d printers.

or guns or cars or to enslave each other or even (to enslave) non-human mammels.

 

I just think it's dumb how we act like each decade has its own thing. I think there is more continuity over time than allows for abrupt shifts on cue every ten years. Yet people talk about the 60s like it had a nice clear cut beginning and end, and every other decade too, for that matter.

 

well this is the decade of denying the significance of decades.

 

To thread title: that's debatable.

Not that I actually know. But it could be debatable.

 

this is absolutely true.
i wasn't meaning to suggest clear demarkations of their beginnings and ends,
but rather typical things associated with each and what they brought us.

and by that i mean often many things for most of them, and things seeming to be opposites and contradictions of each other.

the list of things happening and changing in the 60s is longer then my arm,
in the 70s the struggles of the 60s became for a brief instance of time, a kind of new establishment,
which the 80s knee jerked against.

no matter how good or bad conditions are over all,
a decade is about as long as people will put up with not insisting on changing them.