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[Bernardo de La Paz]

35. Decline/Rise: Date-pinning misses the boat and the event 52 years ago is not the point.

First, date-pinning is a less than useless exercise, wasteful like arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

It is an example of a seductive but misguided pattern of thought: binary thinking. The kind of thinking that sees things as Before & After, black & white, Yay or Nay, right or wrong, Left or Right, In or Out, Blue or Red, Us or Them, bad or good, Republican or Democrat, hawk or dove. It is very closely related to pigeonholing: capitalist / socialist / communist / liberal / libertarian / conservative / fascist / pacifist.

It is too easy to slip into a mode of thinking that there is a point in time where suddenly everything changed (even if people are not consciously aware of it). Assassinations, wars, inventions, arrivals, deaths, etc.

"We stopped trusting our government". Who is this we? Trust suddenly stopped and completely disappeared?

The truth is that some people have gradual changes of sentiment and some people have 'epiphanies' and sudden enlightenments / onsets of wrong-headedness.

Another truth is that these changes occur in small numbers and then larger numbers and do not occur all at once.

A further truth is that large portions of the American populace still trust the government.

Yet more truth is that most people trust some portions of "The Government" more than other portions. For example many trust the FDA and EPA and FBI more than they trust the NSA, CIA, Defense Department, or Congress.

Distrust of the US government began before it was formed. Trust in the government has always existed and will always exist. Both statements are true and compatible.

Anarchists distrusted the government when they bombed Wall Street one hundred years ago.
Women suffragettes distrusted the government while they were getting the vote one hundred years ago.
Filmmakers distrusted the government while the blacklist and McCarthyism were rampant in the 1950s.
Many people trusted the government after the Kennedy assassination until the Watergate crisis a decade later.
Many people trusted the government until the Iran-Contra affair of Reagan's regime.
... etc ...


Secondly, there are many many measures that indicate a rise in the project known as the People of the United States of America.

* Civil rights for women, visible minorities including racial minorities, and invisible minorities including ethnic and sexual orientation minorities.
* Access for differently abled people.
* Better health
* Access to abortion and birth control
* Access to information
* Greater freedom of expression in the arts and music and on the streets
* Great telecommunications and travel uniting people and families

I could go on, but of course it does not deny that there are many aspects of modern American life that are measures of decline, including some that you enumerate.