A lot (all?) could just be aging. There are a lot of baby boomers and they are getting older. It is natural for people to remember the "good old days" as they get older, and this seems to happen whether the "old days" were, objectively, good or bad. Societal values are always changing, and there seems to be something about the common values when one was young that keeps tugging at us as we age. As a baby boomer myself, I'm not sure I can separate this process within myself from my perception of what it happening.
But I also feel this discontent and concern, and I wonder a lot about where society is going. I worry about the increasing dependence on government, the loss of self-reliance. I was heartened by the reaction of a lot of New Yorkers after 9/11--I saw promising glimmers of the self-reliance that made this country great. But it too rapidly disappeared under the seemingly ever-urgent need to find someone to blame, preferably ourselves. Yes, there was someone to blame--the hijackers. How that got twisted into it all being our fault (nevermind the idiotic conspiracy theories that it was all engineered by our own government) is beyond me. But some of this isn't all that new in my lifetime--it didn't take long for conspiracy theorists to come out of the woodwork after JFK was shot.
I also worry about the cult of victimology. This does seem to be new, or at least I sure don't remember anything like this when I was young. Right now one of the big issues is homosexual marriage. I keep seeing complaints about how homosexuals are oppressed. Regardless of how you feel about marriages between homosexuals, the idea that they are oppressed is ridiculous on its face. Yes, I have absolutely no doubt that they face discrimination from time to time and that there are jerks out there who cannot accept homosexuals no matter what and are loud about it. But I know many gay people, and objectively, none of them is suffering from oppression. One (who unfortunately passed away in an accident) was one of the most prominent men in his field--worldwide. Hardly oppressed.
When did being compassionate become self-indulgent? I am very mindful of Shelby Steele's admonition that white folks need black folks to remain victims, another form of subservience, in order to feel good about helping them. This applies to all victim groups. We want to fancy ourselves compassionate, but without victims, we have no one to be compassionate for. I also blame some "victim" groups for taking advantage of this. A great example is people who are obese. Some of them have run into jerks who are insensitive enough to joke about their weight, or who conjure up bizarre reasoning to deny them employment, or whatever. But just because there are jerks out there does not mean that obese people are a victim class. It's gotten beyond bizarre.
This world isn't the world I grew up in. When I was growing up, women were systematically discriminated against, but that didn't stop a lot of women. They bulled ahead and did what they wanted and succeeded. They set the example against which such discrimination could not be sustained. I know of no successful woman who got ahead by complaining. The got ahead the old-fashioned way--by being competent and working hard. People of all types "made it" and didn't expect society to change for them. I think they knew inside that they could change society, and they did. But then, and I'm sorry to be so blunt, the slackers decided they could succeed by becoming victims. Pure self-indulgence.
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