The core problem that hasn’t been (and likely will not be) addressed here boils down to the accelerated decline of the American middle class caused by grotesque income and wealth inequality.
As a former elected public school board member I can tell you with certainty that the single biggest discriminator for kids educational outcome****sis theaffluenceof their parents. Kids from wealthier families do better socially, emotionally and especially academically. This is true across-the-board, in every school whether public or private.
Poorer families where both parents have to work one or more jobs have fewer resources to commit to their children’s studies, homework, after school activities, etc. The most limited resource is, after all, free time.
Families that can afford to have one parent either not working or working part time have the luxury of time to manage the household and deal with the thousand last-minute issues that always pop up with school age kids. It is exponentially more difficult for families with two full-time working parents to be involved and invested in their children’s education.
The blog had another article addressing this specific point and it is a good one to bring up. Income and home environment play a huge role in how people grow up.
But that applies to absolute income, not income relative to third parties, which is what "inequality" references. It'd be interesting to see if a "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality actually does impact those metrics.
The author doesn't seem to consider the idea that maybe the reason the people in charge seem to be investing more in security rather than restoring trust is because the people in charge never really gave a crap whether or not people trusted them, just that they obeyed.
In order to solve this mess we're in, people have to learn about power dynamics. The safest way to restore trust in society isn't to trust the people in charge to "do the right thing" nor is it to give them measures to force compliance. The safest way to restore trust in society is to give the average joe these measures.
I certainly think Republicans are absolutely the biggest problem we're facing right now. But I think the only reason they got so big in the first place is because of the milquetoast moderate democrats who don't believe in anything but the maintenance of the status quo and thus, their power.
The reason the Republicans of old seemed more reasonable (or at least less racist) is because they lived in a society where the media wasn't as captured as it is today. If a republican the quiet part about their policies out loud then the average American would know about it, know about the context behind it, and not have it presented to them by spin doctors who were paid to portray it on the most positive possible light they could. So it was more effective for a republican to put on a civilized veneer and claim an air of plausible deniability to the more troubling implications of their policies.
So if I have a choice between a raving, frothing lunatic who wants to put anyone who isn't a white "Christian" male in chains or in graves, and those who want the gap between rich and poor to grow ever wider but otherwise leave vulnerable populations alone, yeah, I'm gonna pick the democrat.
But we're not going to defeat the republicans unless we acknowledge economic issues as important as social and political ones. The Republican party needs to be defeated and politically disempowered, but the democrats need to change to serve the common man as well.
> is because of the milquetoast moderate democrats who don't believe in anything but the maintenance of the status quo and thus, their power.
Not really? That's the scapegoat of the fascists, when they have to come up with some pseudoprofund bullshit to replace the obvious reason to vote them (fuck minorities).
Even when Manchin and Sinema were ruining plans for something bigger (and they were not even milquetoast, they were the most right wing dem senators at least before Fetterman got his brain cooked), they held that power because they were the marginal votes in a chamber with no margins. Not because even that amoeba of schumer wanted to downsize the BBB. And even what remained was not only better than explosive diarrhea, but also (yes) of the then status quo.
The median member of the party is only as good as whoever showed up at the booths wanted them to be.
> But we're not going to defeat the republicans unless we acknowledge economic issues as important as social and political ones.
Kamala harris easily did that like 20 times each rally and each interview.
> but the democrats need to change to serve the common man as well.
And the common internet poster should start to avoid the MAGA (or tankies) narrative of "nobody else cares about the poor man", and start instead to underline how the average joe doesn't even understand the Dodd–Frank Act existed, or that the IRA was $1T (one motherfucking trillion dollars) to improve everything and the kitchen sink.
It's nuts that you managed to have both an excessively accusatory theory against "media" (as if even after consolidation they were all shit, as if Jon Stewart and Bari Weiss were the same), but also found completely normal and justified for people not to go vote.
> The proliferation of checkpoints is the outward symptom of an inward decay: the fraying of our shared moral fabric.
Tell me, when exactly did we have a shared moral fabric? Was it when the national guard was shooting students at Kent State?
How about when the FBI wiretapped martin luther king?
Did we have a shared moral fabric when the german american bund was holding swastika rallies in new york, or when white supremacists marched in charlottesville?
Was the jim crow era when we were all united as one happy family, or perhaps it was further back, closer to the civil war?
Why is the idea of a golden era so seductive that people ignore history to embrace it?
Maybe not a golden era, how about a time when people had some shared trust. When kids going to school didn't have to go through metal detectors and same for federal buildings or concerts. The shift started around 9/11 and we have never been able to go back to trusting others.
Why not opt for the simple explanation: that kids didnt have to go through metal detectors in a time when school shootings didnt happen?
The focus on schools is particularly awkward because the cause of the changes in schools could not be more obvious: school shootings. It has nothing at all to do with 9/11 and everything to do with the popularization of school shootings as a way for disaffected nihilist teens to become famous and society's total inability to settle on a solution that has any understanding of what drives those teens to act.
As a result we spiral into further security measures because we have no answers to treating the root of the problem...but what the root of the problem is remains obvious.
It's obvious to me that people's attitudes about guns in the US are significantly different from in most other countries (and have been increasingly extreme), and I think that's enough to explain it.
Of course, this is not something that can be changed easily, if at all. But it seems silly to me for anyone to think there's not a connection.
> It's obvious to me that people's attitudes about guns in the US are significantly different from in most other countries (and have been increasingly extreme), and I think that's enough to explain it.
Unfortunately, it's not enough to explain it. Explaining it requires an explanation. And it's a pity that this seems obvious to you, because the things that seem obvious to us are usually the ones we have the most difficulty describing explicitly, even to ourselves, let alone others.
I'd also question the extent to which it's possible for the attitudes of strangers to be obvious to you -- this is definitely the sort of thing that requires comprehensive, objective measurement, and isn't something we can perceive or intuit from the micro level -- so I have to wonder whether what seems obvious to you may in fact be the result of mistaking your own subjective projections for observation of the world.
> But it seems silly to me for anyone to think there's not a connection.
A connection between what and what? Again, I'm not trying to be rude, but you're speaking in extremely vague terms and saying things are "obvious" instead of actually offering coherent descriptions of what you think those things actually are.
Lax gun regulations and a culture of gun celebration has led to so many firearms being distributed among the US populace that we will never be able to meaningfully restrict them in any reasonable time frame. This easy availability and outright promotion of guns has led to more school shootings here than anywhere else. How much more detail do you need?
Well, something based on actual empirical data and not speculation influenced by your personal ideology would be a good start.
I'll grant that what you're positing here has been rehashed over and over again by people with a vested interest in one side of a political debate or another, so a lot of the publicly available data is tainted by people on both sides of that argument. I don't think it's an argument that will be settled here, even if you do want to rehash it.
But what doesn't get discussed enough is all of the presumptions that everyone takes for granted as they rush into that stale debate. For example:
Regardless of the availability of the means to commit mass murders, what is motivating people to arrive at the intent of killing large numbers of strangers as often as they do?
Why is the cultural response to these events happening always so focused on trying to identify some unique distinction that sets the perpetrator apart from everyone else, despite every distinction ever hypothesized representing a variable shared by many other people who never engaged in mass violence (Bayes' theorem be damned)?
Why does the practical response to these events always gravitate toward locking down the institutions where they take place (e.g. metal detectors and police presence at schools), without ever questioning the nature and function of those institutions themselves, and investigate how that might be contributing to the problem?
Why do we maintain such a short frame of reference in looking at these instances, seeing them as something unique to the present, rather than looking their prevalence over longer timespans? (For example, the deadliest school massacre in American history is still the one that happened in Michigan in 1927 -- why do people think about this as something that started in the 1990s?)
I think given the broader context of the initial conversation, these kinds of questions are worth exploring. And I don't think the answers to any of them -- or to the more commonplace one you drove towards -- are in any way "obvious".
It seems that the root of the problem is that our society, and many if not most societies has lost its way spiritually. We've divided ourselves so successfully that we no longer even want to have a dialog over our differences. Institutions that used to guide and protect us, however inadequately, have become enfeebled (for a host of reasons) and those who seriously wish to recast society so that it serves all of us cannot agree on where, or how to start.. much less what the solution will need to look like.
Yes, one death is a tragedy but thousands are a statistic. Which is why people are still talking about Charlie Kirk but not the other school shooting that happened that very day.
so many of these problems could be solved with simple, basic gun control. Why have metal detectors been installed in so many schools and federal buildings? Why are we only allowed to carry clear bags into concerts and fairs?
Its because organizers are scared witless by the prospect of a mass shooting event.
You know what would prevent mass shooting events on a large scale?
The author is not bragging about the confederacy or something, so it's strange that you didn't mention a single thing that happened after women could open a bank account
Really? Women couldnt open bank accounts in 2017 when white supremacists marched in Charlottesville? That would be a surprise to a lot of women who opened bank accounts and banks who gave them those accounts.
I found this to be an interesting article from a blog I have been following. It talks about how our society has lost a certain level of trust and it is effecting the children the most. We went from having a much more high trust society to everyone being treated as a potential threat when going to events or school.
I've seen much more convincing arguments than this one. Sure, society's moral fabric is fraying, but this is one area where that's not super relevant.
> Children must be taught to respect their community, their elders, and their peers, but they must also see adults and institutions prove that they are worthy of that deference.
Children don't operate on some principle of whether an institution deserves their respect or has their interests at heart. The reason they aren't doing well at school isn't that they used to trust teachers more. The article throws out a bunch of facts about how our institutions are failing but doesn't establish any actual reason for why it's happening.
To be brief, COVID has put many cohorts of children several years behind developmentally because it prevented them from socializing with peers. AI and ubiquitous phone use (combined with companies deliberately targeting them) distract them and tempt them to take the easy way out, which prevents skill development and real learning. Parents are also being squeezed for their time and money like GlockAF said, which prevents them from investing in their children. I would argue that the primary effect of institutional perception is that when parents are led to think the school system is corrupt, they are unlikely to care about their kid's success there.
> A healthy civilization does not maintain order primarily through barricades, bag searches, and facial recognition scanners; it maintains order through shared cultural norms, reciprocal duty, personal character, and mutual respect.
This is true but just isn't the main factor at work. Consider also that it's not new- that kind of close social fabric was lost when we created modern cities, for better or for worse.
This is what "diversity is strength" has ultimately led to. An avalanche of illegal immigration meant that we can't trust just anyone inside the county's borders.
It's not the immigrants jacking up your power bill, denying you a raise, evicting you from your home, or otherwise profiting directly from your misery. They're poor people trying to meet their basic needs, exactly like you. You and the immigrants are both getting fucked over by the exact same rich masters, but they convinced you to hate your fellow poors instead of the real enemy.
GlockAF | 22 hours ago
The core problem that hasn’t been (and likely will not be) addressed here boils down to the accelerated decline of the American middle class caused by grotesque income and wealth inequality.
As a former elected public school board member I can tell you with certainty that the single biggest discriminator for kids educational outcome****s is the affluence of their parents. Kids from wealthier families do better socially, emotionally and especially academically. This is true across-the-board, in every school whether public or private.
Poorer families where both parents have to work one or more jobs have fewer resources to commit to their children’s studies, homework, after school activities, etc. The most limited resource is, after all, free time.
Families that can afford to have one parent either not working or working part time have the luxury of time to manage the household and deal with the thousand last-minute issues that always pop up with school age kids. It is exponentially more difficult for families with two full-time working parents to be involved and invested in their children’s education.
[OP] xxDeadpooledxx | 22 hours ago
The blog had another article addressing this specific point and it is a good one to bring up. Income and home environment play a huge role in how people grow up.
ILikeBumblebees | 20 hours ago
But that applies to absolute income, not income relative to third parties, which is what "inequality" references. It'd be interesting to see if a "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality actually does impact those metrics.
mirh | 2 hours ago
> the accelerated decline of the American middle class caused by grotesque income and wealth inequality.
Which happens because bigots keep voting ancaps because they have no morality and will try to do racist shit too.
No_Height8570 | 20 hours ago
The author doesn't seem to consider the idea that maybe the reason the people in charge seem to be investing more in security rather than restoring trust is because the people in charge never really gave a crap whether or not people trusted them, just that they obeyed.
In order to solve this mess we're in, people have to learn about power dynamics. The safest way to restore trust in society isn't to trust the people in charge to "do the right thing" nor is it to give them measures to force compliance. The safest way to restore trust in society is to give the average joe these measures.
mirh | 2 hours ago
> the people in charge never really gave a crap whether
The people in charge in 2025 aren't the people in charge in 2009, or 1987.
If you don't explicitly name repuliKKKans you seem to be pretending nothing matters and people should just sit down living the last days of weimar.
No_Height8570 | an hour ago
I certainly think Republicans are absolutely the biggest problem we're facing right now. But I think the only reason they got so big in the first place is because of the milquetoast moderate democrats who don't believe in anything but the maintenance of the status quo and thus, their power.
The reason the Republicans of old seemed more reasonable (or at least less racist) is because they lived in a society where the media wasn't as captured as it is today. If a republican the quiet part about their policies out loud then the average American would know about it, know about the context behind it, and not have it presented to them by spin doctors who were paid to portray it on the most positive possible light they could. So it was more effective for a republican to put on a civilized veneer and claim an air of plausible deniability to the more troubling implications of their policies.
So if I have a choice between a raving, frothing lunatic who wants to put anyone who isn't a white "Christian" male in chains or in graves, and those who want the gap between rich and poor to grow ever wider but otherwise leave vulnerable populations alone, yeah, I'm gonna pick the democrat.
But we're not going to defeat the republicans unless we acknowledge economic issues as important as social and political ones. The Republican party needs to be defeated and politically disempowered, but the democrats need to change to serve the common man as well.
mirh | 26 minutes ago
> is because of the milquetoast moderate democrats who don't believe in anything but the maintenance of the status quo and thus, their power.
Not really? That's the scapegoat of the fascists, when they have to come up with some pseudoprofund bullshit to replace the obvious reason to vote them (fuck minorities).
Even when Manchin and Sinema were ruining plans for something bigger (and they were not even milquetoast, they were the most right wing dem senators at least before Fetterman got his brain cooked), they held that power because they were the marginal votes in a chamber with no margins. Not because even that amoeba of schumer wanted to downsize the BBB. And even what remained was not only better than explosive diarrhea, but also (yes) of the then status quo.
The median member of the party is only as good as whoever showed up at the booths wanted them to be.
> But we're not going to defeat the republicans unless we acknowledge economic issues as important as social and political ones.
Kamala harris easily did that like 20 times each rally and each interview.
> but the democrats need to change to serve the common man as well.
And the common internet poster should start to avoid the MAGA (or tankies) narrative of "nobody else cares about the poor man", and start instead to underline how the average joe doesn't even understand the Dodd–Frank Act existed, or that the IRA was $1T (one motherfucking trillion dollars) to improve everything and the kitchen sink.
It's nuts that you managed to have both an excessively accusatory theory against "media" (as if even after consolidation they were all shit, as if Jon Stewart and Bari Weiss were the same), but also found completely normal and justified for people not to go vote.
Synaps4 | 22 hours ago
> The proliferation of checkpoints is the outward symptom of an inward decay: the fraying of our shared moral fabric.
Tell me, when exactly did we have a shared moral fabric? Was it when the national guard was shooting students at Kent State?
How about when the FBI wiretapped martin luther king?
Did we have a shared moral fabric when the german american bund was holding swastika rallies in new york, or when white supremacists marched in charlottesville?
Was the jim crow era when we were all united as one happy family, or perhaps it was further back, closer to the civil war?
Why is the idea of a golden era so seductive that people ignore history to embrace it?
[OP] xxDeadpooledxx | 22 hours ago
Maybe not a golden era, how about a time when people had some shared trust. When kids going to school didn't have to go through metal detectors and same for federal buildings or concerts. The shift started around 9/11 and we have never been able to go back to trusting others.
Synaps4 | 22 hours ago
Why not opt for the simple explanation: that kids didnt have to go through metal detectors in a time when school shootings didnt happen?
The focus on schools is particularly awkward because the cause of the changes in schools could not be more obvious: school shootings. It has nothing at all to do with 9/11 and everything to do with the popularization of school shootings as a way for disaffected nihilist teens to become famous and society's total inability to settle on a solution that has any understanding of what drives those teens to act.
As a result we spiral into further security measures because we have no answers to treating the root of the problem...but what the root of the problem is remains obvious.
ILikeBumblebees | 20 hours ago
> ...but what the root of the problem is remains obvious.
Is it obvious? Lots of people have wildly varying theories, but how are any of them really substantiated?
slfnflctd | 11 hours ago
It's obvious to me that people's attitudes about guns in the US are significantly different from in most other countries (and have been increasingly extreme), and I think that's enough to explain it.
Of course, this is not something that can be changed easily, if at all. But it seems silly to me for anyone to think there's not a connection.
ILikeBumblebees | 5 hours ago
> It's obvious to me that people's attitudes about guns in the US are significantly different from in most other countries (and have been increasingly extreme), and I think that's enough to explain it.
Unfortunately, it's not enough to explain it. Explaining it requires an explanation. And it's a pity that this seems obvious to you, because the things that seem obvious to us are usually the ones we have the most difficulty describing explicitly, even to ourselves, let alone others.
I'd also question the extent to which it's possible for the attitudes of strangers to be obvious to you -- this is definitely the sort of thing that requires comprehensive, objective measurement, and isn't something we can perceive or intuit from the micro level -- so I have to wonder whether what seems obvious to you may in fact be the result of mistaking your own subjective projections for observation of the world.
> But it seems silly to me for anyone to think there's not a connection.
A connection between what and what? Again, I'm not trying to be rude, but you're speaking in extremely vague terms and saying things are "obvious" instead of actually offering coherent descriptions of what you think those things actually are.
slfnflctd | 4 hours ago
Lax gun regulations and a culture of gun celebration has led to so many firearms being distributed among the US populace that we will never be able to meaningfully restrict them in any reasonable time frame. This easy availability and outright promotion of guns has led to more school shootings here than anywhere else. How much more detail do you need?
ILikeBumblebees | 2 hours ago
> How much more detail do you need?
Well, something based on actual empirical data and not speculation influenced by your personal ideology would be a good start.
I'll grant that what you're positing here has been rehashed over and over again by people with a vested interest in one side of a political debate or another, so a lot of the publicly available data is tainted by people on both sides of that argument. I don't think it's an argument that will be settled here, even if you do want to rehash it.
But what doesn't get discussed enough is all of the presumptions that everyone takes for granted as they rush into that stale debate. For example:
Regardless of the availability of the means to commit mass murders, what is motivating people to arrive at the intent of killing large numbers of strangers as often as they do?
Why is the cultural response to these events happening always so focused on trying to identify some unique distinction that sets the perpetrator apart from everyone else, despite every distinction ever hypothesized representing a variable shared by many other people who never engaged in mass violence (Bayes' theorem be damned)?
Why does the practical response to these events always gravitate toward locking down the institutions where they take place (e.g. metal detectors and police presence at schools), without ever questioning the nature and function of those institutions themselves, and investigate how that might be contributing to the problem?
Why do we maintain such a short frame of reference in looking at these instances, seeing them as something unique to the present, rather than looking their prevalence over longer timespans? (For example, the deadliest school massacre in American history is still the one that happened in Michigan in 1927 -- why do people think about this as something that started in the 1990s?)
I think given the broader context of the initial conversation, these kinds of questions are worth exploring. And I don't think the answers to any of them -- or to the more commonplace one you drove towards -- are in any way "obvious".
picklebits | 20 hours ago
It seems that the root of the problem is that our society, and many if not most societies has lost its way spiritually. We've divided ourselves so successfully that we no longer even want to have a dialog over our differences. Institutions that used to guide and protect us, however inadequately, have become enfeebled (for a host of reasons) and those who seriously wish to recast society so that it serves all of us cannot agree on where, or how to start.. much less what the solution will need to look like.
ziper1221 | 16 hours ago
> Why not opt for the simple explanation: that kids didnt have to go through metal detectors in a time when school shootings didnt happen?
The deadliest school attack in US history happened in 1927. School shootings in the 21st century remain statistically irrelevant.
simAlity | 14 hours ago
Yes, one death is a tragedy but thousands are a statistic. Which is why people are still talking about Charlie Kirk but not the other school shooting that happened that very day.
Synaps4 | 16 hours ago
> statistically irrelevant.
Good thing people's fears and the security policies they demand based on those fears are completely unrelated to statistics.
simAlity | 14 hours ago
so many of these problems could be solved with simple, basic gun control. Why have metal detectors been installed in so many schools and federal buildings? Why are we only allowed to carry clear bags into concerts and fairs?
Its because organizers are scared witless by the prospect of a mass shooting event.
You know what would prevent mass shooting events on a large scale?
Gun control.
retrojoe | 5 hours ago
> When kids going to school didn't have to go through metal detectors
That's pre-90s at the very least
mirh | 2 hours ago
The author is not bragging about the confederacy or something, so it's strange that you didn't mention a single thing that happened after women could open a bank account
Synaps4 | 2 hours ago
Really? Women couldnt open bank accounts in 2017 when white supremacists marched in Charlottesville? That would be a surprise to a lot of women who opened bank accounts and banks who gave them those accounts.
mirh | 47 minutes ago
Sorry I skipped a part. What I meant was "and before obviously the orange man"
[OP] xxDeadpooledxx | 23 hours ago
I found this to be an interesting article from a blog I have been following. It talks about how our society has lost a certain level of trust and it is effecting the children the most. We went from having a much more high trust society to everyone being treated as a potential threat when going to events or school.
Mactham | 20 hours ago
I've seen much more convincing arguments than this one. Sure, society's moral fabric is fraying, but this is one area where that's not super relevant.
> Children must be taught to respect their community, their elders, and their peers, but they must also see adults and institutions prove that they are worthy of that deference.
Children don't operate on some principle of whether an institution deserves their respect or has their interests at heart. The reason they aren't doing well at school isn't that they used to trust teachers more. The article throws out a bunch of facts about how our institutions are failing but doesn't establish any actual reason for why it's happening.
To be brief, COVID has put many cohorts of children several years behind developmentally because it prevented them from socializing with peers. AI and ubiquitous phone use (combined with companies deliberately targeting them) distract them and tempt them to take the easy way out, which prevents skill development and real learning. Parents are also being squeezed for their time and money like GlockAF said, which prevents them from investing in their children. I would argue that the primary effect of institutional perception is that when parents are led to think the school system is corrupt, they are unlikely to care about their kid's success there.
> A healthy civilization does not maintain order primarily through barricades, bag searches, and facial recognition scanners; it maintains order through shared cultural norms, reciprocal duty, personal character, and mutual respect.
This is true but just isn't the main factor at work. Consider also that it's not new- that kind of close social fabric was lost when we created modern cities, for better or for worse.
1millionbucks | 10 hours ago
This is what "diversity is strength" has ultimately led to. An avalanche of illegal immigration meant that we can't trust just anyone inside the county's borders.
sllewgh | 7 hours ago
It's not the immigrants jacking up your power bill, denying you a raise, evicting you from your home, or otherwise profiting directly from your misery. They're poor people trying to meet their basic needs, exactly like you. You and the immigrants are both getting fucked over by the exact same rich masters, but they convinced you to hate your fellow poors instead of the real enemy.