What Older Folks Can Do for the Young

For the young adults struggling in today’s economy, we older folks can tell them that our country wasn’t always like this. We lived through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when CEOs made less than 100 times what their employees were paid rather than over 400 times as much now; when you could get a college degree and even a Ph.D. at an excellent state supported (not state assisted) university for very little money and no student loans; when “union” was not a dirty word and working class pay was sufficient to raise a family with a stay-at-home mom; when TV news stations actually had investigative reporters on staff and made an effort to be objective, so the populace was somewhat informed; and many other things were different from now.

Why did things change? 40 years of mostly Republican policies after Reagan changed our nation. Taxes were lowered for the wealthy, and since the rich get richer, the top 1% had a huge gain in wealth, while everyone else stayed about the same. Funding for education was cut, for a variety of “official” reasons, but mostly because it was a government benefit for the middle and working classes. Reagan began union busting with the air traffic controllers, and states began enacting “right to work” laws, which should really be called “right to work for less” laws. Reagan began deregulation, and television stations were no longer required, as a condition for using part of the public airwaves, to devote a certain amount of time to publicly beneficial shows such as news. And on and on.

How did they get so many people to vote against their own self interest? Fear and loathing. Yes, fear and loathing. Keep people afraid of communists, criminals, or terrorists, and they won’t think clearly. Keep people hating gays and minorities and “welfare queens” and “Willie Hortons” and they won’t see that they are being screwed and they won’t band together to solve the real problems.

Conservatives tend to use, and Reagan was a master of, the anecdote, which is a short story about a specific case that seems to prove a point. The human brain is wired to respond to stories, to narrative. Certain stories bypass the logical brain and go straight to the emotional centers, thus influencing people’s subsequent thinking. Low information voters are especially influenced by a vivid story, and they don’t stop to analyze the larger context. Liberals tend to use reason, facts, and statistics to make their points. Needless to say, these things do not go to our emotional centers! Yet we cannot solve the complex problems of today unless we are willing to do the intellectual work to look at the evidence and work towards compromise.

Actually, now that I have written that last sentence, I have lost all hope! Sorry, young people.