America used to be the shining city on the hill. The envy of the world. Historically, they were responsible for a great number of the world’s inventions and technological progress. For the majority of the 20th century they were at the forefront of the world in developments in technology, science, entertainment, finance, whatever you name it. I mean this is a nation that produced the world’s first nuclear weapons, first landed a man on the moon, popularized assembly line manufacturing and invented transistors and circuits. That’s what America was at it’s peak. Incredibly smart skilled people drove America forward back then – and still do today, just to a much lesser extent.
The issue is somewhere along the way after America’s stunning growth and victory in WWII, they started to falter, and it’s mostly due to lack of education I think. It was a gradual process, but certainly you could say America’s golden age ended somewhere in the 1960s amid the cultural shifts of that era. And the 1970s and 1980s was the beginning of a decline as manufacturing became outsourced and drugs ran rampant in American society. Beginning with the JFK assassination, LBJ’s Vietnam War and Nixon’s scandals, the public started to distrust and lose faith in the government. The military buildup of the Reagan years and today was a fulfillment of Eisenhower’s ‘military industrial complex’ warning. I see the election of George W Bush as a backwards step for America in 2000, kind of a precursor to Trump. Nowadays in the social media era, there’s misinformation and conspiracies spread everywhere and because proper education is more expensive and less attainable, there are more ignorant people in America and another issue is nowadays Americans distrust the government and mainstream media. Back in America’s golden age, they by and large had faith in the government and the media – but nowadays the media became twisted by the rich and the common people don’t have as much faith in them anymore to present an unbiased view of the world; they then seek alternate sources of information which is likely to be untrue and distorted, causing Americans to believe in crazy conspiracy theories and misinformation. They also seem to blame immigrants for a lot of their plight, which is unfortunate considering immigrants were responsible for a great number of America’s achievements as mentioned above.
It was a slow gradual decline in America, now all we see the remains of a former great country, led by an autocratic ruler that almost half of them still worship. It’s really sad actually.
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