Posted on 11/30/2013 9:44:22 AM PST by Olog-hai
You can take our word for it. Americans don’t trust each other anymore.
We’re not talking about the loss of faith in big institutions such as the government, the church or Wall Street, which fluctuates with events. For four decades, a gut-level ingredient of democracy—trust in the other fellow—has been quietly draining away.
These days, only one third of Americans say most people can be trusted. Half felt that way in 1972, when the General Social Survey first asked the question. …
An AP-GfK poll conducted last month found that Americans are suspicious of each other in everyday encounters. Less than one third expressed a lot of trust in clerks who swipe their credit cards, drivers on the road, or people they meet when traveling. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
They were probably more in denial, and less addicted to paranoia. One of the interesting side effects of the information age is that no news is local, we get to find out about tons of bad things happening that we never would have before (because it happened 3 states and really isn’t that interesting) and get all worked up over it. Back when news was half an hour of local, half and hour of national and maybe you skimmed the paper you just didn’t find out about as many carjackings and knockouts and faked rude tips.
It still kind of mattered, even in the view of God as mean traffic cop in the sky and if you had a radar detector you could blast by that Smokey with no seeming ill effect. Now people often don’t even believe in a God to disobey.
And yeah, baby boomers with their sophomoric ideas were coming of age... but the vast majority of the country in ‘72 was still ‘trustworthy and trusted’ - not like today.
In 1964 the biggest high school problem was ‘spitballs’... Do you know what it is today? That tells the story.
That's good news...
Which is funny when you think about it, since many in the country were openly tolerating much more corrupt government on the local and state level. The reason people yawned for Clinton was fatigue, by the time he took office there’d been a bunch of presidential scandals (Watergate really opened a can of worms on that front) a bunch of congressional hearings and it had all really amounted to nothing. The era of presidential scandals had turned into the press crying wolf, still is that way 20 years later.
The vast majority of the country was just like they are now. Actually much worse, there were a lot more neighborhoods that were “off limits” to people of the “wrong” color.
If you think spitballs were the biggest problem in high school in 1964 you are quite simply lying to yourself. Heck they had a broadway about youth gangs stabbing each other in 1961, people knew high school wasn’t the land of milk and honey.
We're just a big enterprise zone. A big frigging mall and no one really knows what's in it.............
When half the country views the other half as a piggy bank to be smashed open and looted, naturally there is going to be a modicum of distrust.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.