This Modern World

Yes yes, I know there is a comic strip with that title. I used to read it. But what we are addressing today is more to do with the WuMo topic here:

In a sense, the person coming out of the green blob is already here. The recent election reminded us of the voters decided based on some trivial item and voted for Trump. And voted nothing else on the entire ballot.

The lack of knowledge about the world by many young voters is shocking. I may have been caught in something very important from my time as a voting age young man: Vietnam. I was quite aware of politics due to that one thing. I even had to think for a minute about my citizenship. in today's elections, Trump foreigners are playing that role. But it now produces the right wing reaction (based on what? mostly film clips on Fox) wheras in my time Vietnam caused a shift to the left among the young. We also had hippies with ideas of sharing the world. The MAGA youth experiences a zero sum world. What is in this for me?

People in general know a lot about some thing, their job for example. Not so much about news or politics. Or even science or medicine. Compared to this extreme specialization of jobs and skills today, we were all "renaissance men" in 1960 or even 1975, when I had a college degreee. I understood a good amount of chemistry and enough of physics related to it. I could use a slide rule, I did addition and subtraction with a pencil and paper. I understood magnetism (it was needed in chemistry) and I had some sense of electronics. I knew to use a thick extension cord if something I needed power to in my yard was far away. Resitance goes up if you use a thin cord. Less power at the other end.

You did not need to college for some sense of the world. Working class people in 1900 were already quite well educated simply by reading the newspaper. They understood their bargaining power. Union busting was a strong effort by rough guys. Now you just use politcs and money.

We also knew how to find things without the internet. We had reference books on topics we did not use daily, but they were available.

There are numerous things Trump kept repeating over and over that are lies. it does not take a lot of effort to find out what tariffs or trade deficits are. Trump ideas could vagely sound as if you are promoting American jobs and goods. If you taxed (the tariff) all imported goods so severely you might end up with American goods taking over. But that would take decades and we would have more expensive goods than before even then. Because our wages are much higher.

Very sepecific things like the Chips Act can promote certain industries. And we CAN in fact enter into things that are new technology related to energy. And we can make electric cars. They are a new thing and now cost more. That will change. The microwave oven took 50 years to make it from labs to kitchens.

The things that Trump will increase prices on are consumer goods. Things the MAGA folk buy at Walmart.

Anyway, it is sad to see this development of people who would be perfectly able to understand things just dismissing them as something liberals promote for some odd reason. Some reason that is going to hurt them someday. Every complex, difficult matter is assumed to be a conspiracy. Find someone you trust to read it and guide you.

Connected to that there is the distrust of science and all experts who know things. It's not that complicated. Even if you distrust vaccines, it is possible to read an article or two on the benefits and dangers. Outside of politics, social sciences and so on, Wikipedia is a completely reliable source of basic facts. For free.

The people have failed us. Based on little information, they have chosen a leader who is putting billionaires in charge and who will make life misearable for most Tump voters.

Lastly, I seem to have entered the age when we seniors can actually say "you young folks just don't know..." But I don't know that any of the Trump voters are actually listening. They have no idea of the world with polio and many of them do not remember what inflation is, even. It happens, and Reagan had a good 5% but seems to have got in because....Jimmy Carter had 9.9%. We had a world event: an oil crisis.