Heavy stuff for a Monday morning I know.

Having a chat with my other half over the weekend prompted by the recent killings in Germany and her opinion was that we’re in a terrible state of emergency and anyone considering having kids at the moment is making a mistake….

My attitude is that horrible things happened in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up – terrorism and mass killings are not a new invention after all. But with 24 hour news, Facebook and the rest of social media anything that happens is reported and picked over immediately with speculation being the order of the day with most events.

What do you think?? Are we living in a better world than we did or are we all heading to hell in a handcart? Have Generation Z got it rougher than Gen X?

There’s a lot less hardcore and italian piano rave about these days so I’d say we’re doomed.

horrible things happened in the 70s and 80s and 90s when I was growing up – terrorism and mass killings are not a new invention after all.

Irish terrorism was flavour of the day when i was young. I remember the local swimming pool being shut, when a poor irish fella left without his bag; bomb squad came and blew up his trunks/ sarnies!

It’s not really that different.

25 years ago starts quite positively –

Cease-fire ends Persian Gulf War (April 3); UN forces are victorious. Background: The Persian Gulf War

Europeans end sanctions on South Africa (April 15). South African Parliament repeals apartheid laws (June 5).

France agrees to sign 1968 treaty banning spread of atomic weapons (June 3). China accepts nuclear nonproliferation treaty (Aug. 10). Bush-Gorbachev summit negotiates strategic arms reduction treaty (July 31).

Communist Government of Albania resigns (June 4).

Warsaw Pact dissolved (July 1).

Nirvana releases the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the LP Nevermind

But then! Horror!

Grammys awarded in 1991
Record of the Year: “Another Day in Paradise,” Phil Collins

Turn off the news and the world is lovely.

The news is very switched on to certain types of threat. It’s far more likely that a car will knock you over, or you’ll fall off ladders. If these things keep you in bed all day out of fear, then fair enough. Personally, I just crack on.

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1990.html

1990 was probably the start of things turning around, Berlin wall coming down, stuff getting better etc.

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1980.html
70/80’s were probably worse

my standard response to this sort of question is Hesiod Works and Days.

A bloke wrote a book over 2000 years ago saying the world was going to pot.

plus ca change.

We live in a world where we can know more than ever before but in reality can do nothing more than we have ever been able to. You see a bomb go off in Germany, you see a black man shot in the US. But then you had the Red army faction, the KKK and lynchings.

Throw into the mix 1984 and the idea that the best way to control a population is to keep them afraid and here we are.

Have Generation Z got it rougher than Gen X?

No, they just have higher expectations. Life is better now than ever.

thomthumb

Irish terrorism was flavour of the day when i was young.

You can’t call it “Irish Terrorism”. Whilst virtually all of the IRA were Irish, only a tiny fraction of a percentage of Irish people were in the IRA so it’s misleading, and it tars all Irish people with the same brush.

Things are more widely reported nowadays.
I can remember the IRA bombing places, air raid sirens going off for practice in case of the “big drop”, the Munich Olympics, the end of the Vietnam War, Protect & Survive, being told not to take sweeties from strange men, several friends dying at school from falling out of trees conkering, one lad spending all junior school with his legs in an “A-frame”, people arriving at school from Kenya, the church welcoming a family of “boat people”, fear of the eastern Bloc, a divided Europe, the test card on the telly, regular power cuts, cars being really unreliable, Curly-Wurly’s going up to 10p!!
Compared to all that, its not bad now. Although, of course 40 years of neo-con governments and the removal of employment of the working class in the UK are the downsides, not all that other stuff. The big worry for me is the ending of effective antibiotics – that’s the pretty much the biggest mistake of the last 100 years as far as I’m concerned.

In the 70’s you wouldn’t have heard about 95% of the things 24hour news channels and news websites churn out now.

The need to fill web pages and screen time means the tiniest thing gets pushed as ‘news’.

FWIW I feel safer now than as a 14yr old in the early 80s.

There’s a lot less hardcore

Hedge porn, gone. the world is a worse place for losing those surprise finds

You can’t call it “Irish Terrorism”. Whilst virtually all of the IRA were Irish, only a tiny fraction of a percentage of Irish people were in the IRA so it’s misleading, and it tars all Irish people with the same brush.

I see what you did there.

Roughly 25 years ago I was working in fine art transport. 1 day a week would be a day of multi drop work around central london. There were concrete barricades preventing vehicular access to various parts of the city to prevent pretty much the same attack that happened in Manchester instead. On 3 occasions over 2 years I was apprehended in random armed police stops – surrounded by a rolling roadblock in traffic, pulled out of the van by armed, body-armoured cops, van doors flung open and big police dogs sent in to jump about on 2 to 3 million quids worth of art. Then they’d sod off and leave me to repack and secure the van in the middle of 4 lanes of moving traffic.

Around the same time I was installing arts projects around Spaghetti Junction and we had restrictions on when and where we could take vehicles as the site was considered a terror target.

The thing is – a dreadful as current events seem, when they’re current people, actually forget about them pretty quickly. Rewatching Patrick Keiler’s film ‘London’ ,made in 1992, recently (which is a sort of lyrical documentary) theres a really intereting moment in it – while filming the route of their journey is blocked by police cordon because an IRA bomb has gone off. What was interesting was the people around them at that point could remember the bomb targeting Downing Street but had completely forgotten 3 other bombings in London that had happened in the meantime.

Quite surprisingly relevant in lots of ways that film just now 🙂

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v84byeueCBI[/video]

Grammys awarded in 1991
Record of the Year: “Another Day in Paradise,” Phil Collins

That’s completely pre-empted any contrary argument that I was about to present.