What were the signs-of-the-times that you picked up on? Did your own experience with government school have much to do with it? (I’m assuming you were gov-schooled like most of us.)
Yes, I went to public schools but they were vastly superior to what exists today, not even in the same universe really. Most recent college graduates could not pass the eighth grade finals of that day in History, English, Literature or Geography.
I was always struck by the conflicts between what people pay lip service to and what really exists. I noticed at an early age that the government seemed to want to become involved in a lot of things simply for the purpose of control and in most cases government action was far more likely to create problems than to solve them. One of the earliest lessons was when my father signed up for a “free” government program to terrace our hillside farm for erosion control. The end result was to make the problem far worse than it had been with the terrace system that my father had always maintained. After a couple of years we put everything back as it was before.