Morning e/o.
Thank you for helping in cheering me up and the/your input in thinking about stuff that isnt only about by now pretty conventional addressing of ritualistic stuff in dealing with loss, or fear, in some of the threads that have become staples of this forum by now.
First things first - there is a typo in the title. My fault.
Second - I dont expect this to go very far in terms of actually insightful and productive output, because its not an easy discussion to be had, and I already made it maybe a little too emotional to begin with. But then, what do I know.
I felt that something was needed to kick this forum out of perpetually addressing certain topics, that kind of serve as an emotional baseline of what politics seems to be to many pople in here by now.
(Not good, not bad - just is.
)
I'll pick up on some of Xzi's thoughts, because I have an opinion about them already, then think about some of your other points at least, but dont expect it to lead to a fruitful debate already..
The idea of this thread was kind of to also establish, that there are notions like 'freedom', 'equality', 'growth', 'opportunity', 'purpose' and so on that politics also stands for - and that it shouldnt be all about dealing with fears and disaster all the time.
I'll bite nonetheless. There are lots of social changes I'd like to see happen in my lifetime:
America becoming a world leader in green energy, affordable healthcare and medications for everyone, tuition-free college, repeal of Citizens United, shorter election cycles, justice system reforms, and infrastructure overhaul. In the face of our current political climate, however, it's hard to view any of them as realistically achievable. If I'm setting my sights lower, maybe 100% of vehicles on the roads will be electric and autonomous within thirty years. Maybe.
In terms of becoming a 'world leader in green energy', politically this is talk about bootstrapping a new economy - especially in the US. I've heard people sketching it out with aspects of creating 'marshall plans' for poorer countries that could than buy american built green technology with it, bettering international relations - and state financed investment plans that are shooting for big investments in R&D. This within the context, that america has all but left its industrial base in country would be a big shift the countries trajectory. The term moonshot is thrown around in that context. If that comes, I'll be impressed.
Shorter elections cycles in the US would be equivalent to an entire overhaul of the election system, and especially election financing - because the current system is largely based around how often you can mobilize the very large amounts of financing that are needed to run one modern US election cycle. And the answer here is, that you maybe cant do this at the current scale at a much higher frequency.
Then there is the technopostive outlook (technology will account for positive visions for the future) - and idea, thats kind of under attack a little currently. With autonomous vehicles being on googles wishlist - literally "so people can spend more time browsing on the internet", and a few of the recent big societal projects maybe having gone a little askew (could be 'growing pains', I dont know..) and the silicon valley vision of the future not being quite so exciting for many people, than it had been in the past.
100% renewable energy within 30-40 years is a project thats on trajectory and should come to fruition, as far as I can speculate, but then this is also connected with recession and degrwoth on the national economic level in most western societies. So to make that a beacon of hope and excitement, only works for some people.
There is a trope out there that the bigger positive political messages kind of have become a thing of the past as complexity and the interconnected nature of economies hasn't left much room for political decision making at the big scale - I'm just mentioning it in passing.
But I still dont think, that always playing to peoples fears and concerns is really a viable strategy for political engagement for a younger generation.
Thats why the 'innitial' concept title of this thread was 'Why are so many people interested in the vision and political opinion of a 73 year old.' (Trump).
Thank you for your participation. I'll look into other aspects that you've brought up later.
Have a nice day.
