Are we a complacent society?

[First-light]

When do we say enough is enough? I'm sitting here thinking about this past week. 5 military dead on our own soil by a distraught Muslim. 4 beautiful girls killed by a drunk driver, they were doing the right thing cruising in the limo and fate comes knocking at their door. These things have happened in the past and once again they happen this weekend and nothing gets done about it. Is this the norm??? I hope not….Where are we going to end up if we just watch this happen around us and nothing is done. I don't like the attitudes of the younger generation. I feel they are complacent and will let the world crumble around them. It's happening all around us little by little and if we don't start acting the game will be over before we know it. MHO just venting but I feel a lot of merit here.

[tony m]

A lot of bad things of happened in the past.  It just wasn't as in our face before, like now with the massive efficient media infrastructure we have .

 

People have always killed.  The red flag is when the people start to ask questions and those in control, don't like it.  We are in trouble with that.

[ants]

To answer your question……..YES………"As long as it doesn't affect me right now…..Who cares". The younger generation is clueless and doomed.

[Elmo]

Motor vehicles has been the number one cause of unnatural deaths for a very long time and when was the last time something was done about it?

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Edited July 20, 2015 by Elmo

[bkln]

No $hit Sherlock.....

[Doc]

Are we a complacent society? Maybe. But the world has changed over the course of history and has become a very complex place with a bombardment of complicated problems that defy solution. Simply managing our own lives is a full-time job. The newspapers, radio, TV, and internet flood us with a deluge of horrible and mind-exploding evil and unhappiness, and if we were to react to every scrap of this, we would eventually become completely mad. And so we perform a kind of triage and process only those things that we can influence and still keep our own affairs under control at the same time.

 

Do not expect the world to get simpler and more manageable or to become kinder and gentler. It is not going to happen. And don't assign complacency to our efforts to simply conduct and concern ourselves with our own personal lives. That task alone has become a full time effort and gets more complex with each generation.

 

 

[Uncle Nicky]

I don't think we are a complacent society, more like a "powerless" society. We've watched our manufacturing jobs be sent to Mexico and China, and we sit by watching millions of illegal aliens steal our unskilled labor jobs, and allow millions more foreign contractors with H-1B visas take our clerical and highly skilled jobs. Meanwhile, the cost of living outpaces wage increases. Most of us now realize that voting doesn't help, Republican or Democrat, since the career politicians we are presented with have no loyalty to the people, but to the lobbyists and corporations that put them in power.

Todays kids actually work HARDER than we did. More homework in grade school, and you now need a college degree to be a line cook or file clerk. The 20 and 30-somethings I work with are on call 24-7, and often work nights & weekends to keep up; they're also smarter about computers and technology than the folks my age at the job.

The saddest thing I see with this generation is the use of hard drugs, mostly with the under-achieving or academically challenged crowd.It seems every day I'm reading or hearing about another overdose death, and I know quite a few families who've lost kids to drug addiction; these are not inner-city ghetto kids, but middle-upper class families.

[G-Man]

Very complacent, though I am glad to see the younger generation get fired up over a mascot name chanel or a flag.. perhaps there is hope....

[growalot]

Yes and perhaps as Doc pointed out as a coping mechanism...I think back to when our kids were Oh so little ...we were actually "Behind the times" when we got our Tandy. Mr B said computers will be the down fall of the US and world...I think often on that. You young guys may not understand his meaning behind this... Some old ones will. I have watched over the years as technology has increased and perfected,taking over our jobs,our time, our families,our minds. We can contact anyone, anywhere, anytime but have managed to isolate our selves in the process. At what point when we lose the daily human  physical contact people were use to "Back in the day",do we diminish our own humanity.

Edited July 20, 2015 by growalot

[The_Field_Ager]

Amen Grow.

[dbHunterNY]

I'm almost 32 years old so i'll use the word "we".  each generation is expected to be better than the next; perform better, come up with better ideas or tangible things to make it all work, etc.  we start steps in life later like kids, marriage, and a career, due to the greater requirement for additional education.  so now we're scrambling to catch up back up and more is expected to be accomplished by a certain age.  with technology invented to speed things up even more life is not as slow.  now with photo shop and media things are easy spread like wild fire as if true and easily contorted to be believed.  we're some how supposed to have super natural insite and bull*** detector skills to decipher what is truth and what it not.  so you could say things are a bit more complex and potentially problematic.  along this path to survive and function while still enjoying life it's easy for us to get numb to some things or be over sensitive to others.  doesn't make it right but whenever it's a big deal it's because of those that "can't deal" more than the rest of us.  the world will never be a perfect place and sometimes change is a trial and error process.  there's always going to be bad apples that make the bigger picture seem doomed.  don't compare us.  use honest encouragement and maybe the numbness will lift, and we'll weed out the bad apples or probably at least keep them from screwing anything up but themselves at most.

[phade]

The world drastically changes not with each generation, but rather in much smaller time increments, and the pace of change is growing. 

 

For example:

 

It took from the beginning of time until 1900 to reach 1.5 billion people on this planet. We now have 7 billion. In 115 years, the earth went from 1.5 billion to 7...think about that for a second.

 

From the beginning of time until the 1800's the fastest a human could go was around 20 mph on horseback. When trains reached speeds of 100 mph in the early 1900s, there was talk amongst the scientific community that it could be dangerous to humans, that people could literally lose their minds traveling that fast. In less than a mere 40 years, humans went from 100 mph to around 400 mph in military war planes (WWII). In 1960, we broke the sound barrier. Today, manned space travel flies at more than 17,500 mph.

 

Complacency kills. This generation is no different than the ones prior to it in that regard, and no worse or better. As a society, specialization is the social norm and is becoming a requirement in many cases to achieve success by today's social standards. Specialization probably creates some of this complacency that we see by its very nature because there is not enough education, exposure, and experience with content or situations outside of that specialization. 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 20, 2015 by phade

[moog5050]

"progress" has made life much more complicated, which in turn makes it harder to focus on much beyond one's immediate concerns.  That said, I certainly blame all of the world's problems on dbHunter's and Phade's generation.  The x-gen is still trying to wrestle power from the boomers who don't want to let it go.  Thus, my generation is a bit busy at the moment. 

[Mr VJP]

This is an irresponsible society.  No one is ever really held responsible for their actions in this society.  This society makes excuses for the most horrible crimes, committed by the most despicable people.  We are being conditioned to tolerate the intolerable.  Compassion should be reserved for victims, but irresponsible people should not be declared victims. Consequently, we are breeding more and more irresponsible people everyday.

[The_Field_Ager]

  We are being conditioned to tolerate the intolerable.  

 

 

Absolutely. Look at the media spin being put on the recent Planned Parenthood scandal with the illegal selling of human body parts from post abortive babies. Listen to the lady in the leaked video and marvel at her lack of empathy or compassion. There is an obvious increase of incivility in society. The 'system' is creating a generation of low level sociopaths.

[grampy]

Our parents and grandparents said that our generation, the baby boomers, were a bunch of long haired, dope smoking, lazy, dumb, kids and would not amount to anything. But I think, for the most part we turned out ok. So will the kids of today. Times are a changing, move forward or be left behind. If anything I think it's much tougher to be a kid today, than it was for us.

[jjb4900]

The drunk who killed those four women was not a kid, 55 I believe......so that type of behavior cannot be blamed on the new generation, for the most part, I think the younger generation is actually smarter about drinking and driving then the older people.........as far as everything else that I think is wrong with today's society, I wouldn't even know where to begin.

[Nomad]

Lots of good comments . As for kids today .... I guess it's whatever ones are in your life that we base things on. For me the vast majority are working way harder than my friends and I had to.

Our oldest has two bachelor degrees and works as an RN . She worked may jobs while in high school and college and studied way more than I ever thought of doing . Most of her friends work in medical fields , PT, OT, pharmacy and so on. Trust me they work hard and are held accountable.

Our youngest just got her Masters , with a gpa of 3.94, while being a TA teaching 3 undergrad classes ,correcting all the papers and tests and also studied for and passed 2 parts of the CPA exam at the same time.

Her senior year of college she worked 20 hours a week at an accounting firm while going to school full time. Over the summers she worked 3 jobs, 20 hours at parks and rec, 20 accounting and week ends at Sea Breeze....

Most of their friends got jobs right away, the future CPA got hired by one of the big four a year before graduating .

There are plenty of kids that work hard and are good citizens just like always.

Is it harder for some ? Sure gone are the days one could walk out of HS and get a good factory job , but we know this prepair yourself .

My wife's company was bought and 350 decent factory jobs are going to Mexico next year .

She has gotten job offers with out even looking..... But she has a skilled office job, if your only skill is driving a tow motor (what I did there many moons ago) it's going to be hard.

[dbHunterNY]

The drunk who killed those four women was not a kid, 55 I believe......so that type of behavior cannot be blamed on the new generation, for the most part, I think the younger generation is actually smarter about drinking and driving then the older people.........as far as everything else that I think is wrong with today's society, I wouldn't even know where to begin.

 

yea because most of us can't hold a beer, text on the phone, and drive.  not sure why more don't just stick to the last one and let it be.  I mean how important is it that you need to respond with "k" or a damn emoticon while you driving?!   ....don't mean to go off on a tangent.

[growalot]

I got into a conversation today about this stuff ...was told just wait you haven't seen ANY thing yet....I can't repeat specifics but it's Awful...in fact social implications had to be studied on what is near to arrival. I am going to say..... it is not stuff of fiction anymore .... we are in serious trouble folks.

[Culvercreek hunt club]

yea because most of us can't hold a beer, text on the phone, and drive.  not sure why more don't just stick to the last one and let it be.  I mean how important is it that you need to respond with "k" or a damn emoticon while you driving?!   ....don't mean to go off on a tangent.

Kids just aren't trained like they were when I was growing up. What ever happened to the Generation that could drive, drink a beer, smoke a cig and still turn around and slap the crap out of the kids in the back seat for fighting....at highway speeds. Good ole' multitasking.

[jjb4900]

Kids just aren't trained like they were when I was growing up. What ever happened to the Generation that could drive, drink a beer, smoke a cig and still turn around and slap the crap out of the kids in the back seat for fighting....at highway speeds. Good ole' multitasking.

you forgot to mention that the kids were also standing up on the seats and weren't wearing seatbelts............

[growalot]

You should ask my brother(10yrs older than I) his thoughts on that...

He left the cars back seat at 70mph and lived...to later go on to pull the mower (first time allowed) up over his foot...cutting off 3 toes.... my mother went to jump on the running board of her dads car and he ran her over with the back wheels...Father took cousin for a ride of handle bars and nearly cut off his foot in the rungs...

 

PS ...yes it is hereditary...my accidents that is

Edited July 22, 2015 by growalot

[Culvercreek hunt club]

you forgot to mention that the kids were also standing up on the seats and weren't wearing seatbelts............

Or napping in the back window

[Five Seasons]

Motor vehicles has been the number one cause of unnatural deaths for a very long time and when was the last time something was done about it?

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Elmo, you and I are pretty cool but that's a stupid a55 comment.

 

Motor vehicle accidents have been declining for decades. Safer cars. Started with seat belts, then air bags, then multiple air bags, crumple zones, now my car brakes for me or beeps if i veer out of my lane. rumble strips, better roads, stricter penalties for distracted and drunk driving. better education of why distracted driving is bad.

 

In response to the topic, i hate to be cynical but death is a part of life. We need to do our best to protect against it, but simply living implies some risk in all that we do. Unless we want to board ourselves up in caves part of going out and taking on the world is to understand that there is risk in all that we do. There is acceptable risk (flying on an airplane) and unacceptable (jumping out of a plane without a parachute). Do your best to manage risk according to your beliefs and hold those in positions of influence accountable and live your life.

Edited July 24, 2015 by Belo