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Tom Aldrich's avatar

Economic trends rocking the world over and over again 1870-2010: when Boomers or Boomers’ parents talk about “the way things used to be” in reference to the period you are describing, the implicit span of time forming their concept of the good old days is surprisingly limited, barely more than a generation.

I’m a middle Boomer. I grew up in a medium-sized Ohio industrial town where, as with many others, “everyone” had “always” worked in “the factory,” in this case Big Three automaker plants (we had one of each).

As it turned out, for my hometown “always” really only described the three decades from the 40s to the 70s. The factories I mentioned started as wartime defense plants that transitioned to civilian manufacturing after the war. For my parents’ generation and mine (the first couple decades, anyway), they had always been there.

My point is that the extent to which a particular person experiences waves of change as actual, and destabilizing, change depends in part on the amplitude and frequency of the waves. I think that one of the reasons many people in my part of the world have gone a bit crazy in recent years is that the waves are coming too high and fast. There’s not enough time between waves for things to solidify into a new normality, which can then be experienced as stable and dependable. All that is solid melts into air, as somebody once said, and many people don’t like to see their world melting.

None of this is news to you, of course, but your description of what has been going on in the long 20th century definitely resonates with my subjective impression of what has happened here in Ohio during my lifetime.

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Philip Koop's avatar

No weak men in the books at home

The strong men who have made the world

History lives on the books at home

The books at home

The books at home

It's not made by great men

It's not made by great men

It's not made by great men

It's not made by great men

But in later years, Jon sang "no women" instead of "no weak men".

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