How Soon We Forget

Now is Just Not that Bad

4,000 California Army National Guardsmen patrolled the city to enforce the law

I'd like you now to look up two relatively obscure movies, Gung Ho (1986) and Dutch (1991). If you can, watch them. If not, at least read their plots on Wikipedia. I'll wait.

I hope you noticed. Gung Ho was about losing American jobs to globalism. A significant turning point in Dutch is when they meet a family in a homeless shelter. Note that the family in Dutch were not aberrations, and the father had a good job. They lost their home due to the 1990's Recession caused by the shift to a Post Cold War economy.

Note the dates.

Gung Ho was during the Reagan Administration that is so often invoked with the glow of nostalgia as a time of plenty and growth. Long before NAFTA. Long before Trump uttered the words "because of China". During Reagan's first term, unemployment had reach 10%, and was the first time most Americans ever heard the word 'recession', mostly so we could avoid saying 'depression'. As Reagan took office, Chrysler was being bailed out, and he over saw the bail out of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Co. This remains the "most significant bank failure resolution in the history of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation,". Is any of this sounding familiar?

By his second term, there was constant anxiety of jobs being lost to Japan, as the country was coming into its own economic boom. (Why do I feel deja vu?)

During the time of Dutch, the H. W. Bush Administration, there was a banking crisis caused by lack of regulation. Later, a recession hit causing a rash of home loses, leading to the first time since the Great Depression a large number of middle class families became homeless.

And during all this time, we were dealing with a real concern that the world could be destroyed in nuclear war.

For many of you, this is history, but for at least half of us, this is memory.

Yes, 9/11 was the biggest foreign attack of my lifetime. And yes, the Great Recession was the biggest economic threat of my lifetime. But, look at where we were are now, compared to where we went to in the past. We have learned from the past.

Today our biggest threat is terrorism, before it was nuclear annihilation. Today we have growing difficulties in getting ahead, before it was homelessness.

I write this now, because this morning, Sept 21st 2016, there was a riot is Charlotte, N.C. Fortunately none were seriously hurt. This weekend, we had a terrorist attack. Fortunately none were killed. Please remember that more than 60 died in the L.A. Riots of 1992. In 1995, 168 died in the Oklahoma City Bombing.

At this point, I would apologize for minimizing other's suffering and pain. But I'm not. We are in an environment were too many have political and economic incentive to maximize and excite. Minimizing is what we need. Calming is what we need.

And what I find most frustrating, Trump and many of his supporters are more than old enough to remember when time were worse. Still, they want us to believe these times the worst. And I really can't count them alone. There are forerunners of Trump stoking the flames through radio, TV, and the internet. Again, many of them are old enough to remember. Many of them were part of those problem. They want us to imagine exaggerated fears that were realities of the past and peddle a past free of fear.

Ironically, in my lifetime, there is only one threat different and beyond those like him: Donald J. Trump.