On 2002-03-29 12:22, HopefulCynic68 wrote:
I'm going to respond out of order here.
I think we're all mostly tired of the 3T, aren't we?
NO!
No, I for one am NOT tired of the 3T. The peace and quiet, the chance to live life with a modest probability of not being killed in a random bomb fall or rolled flat by economic disruption (or worse), having the ideologues in check, no, I'm not tired of it at all.
Fortunately, I now suspect it isn't over yet.
The thing that's going to be cool about the 4T is that the action will have a higher purpose and will be less superficial.
Of all the Turnings, the Fourth is the one, objectively, most devoutly to be
dreaded.
This sounds a lot like some of the other posts where people talk about the 'regeneracy'. There's a very natural human tendency to look back to the last 4T for the pattern of the next. I've caught myself doing it, too.
We ask 'when will we get this cycle's depression, this cycle's FDR, this cycle's regeneracy, etc'.
But the 4T is not in any sense assured of a good outcome, or even of leaving the world a better place. At best, whether or not it's better is usually a matter of opinion.
In World War II, it happened that something very close to a real-world battle of good vs. evil came about. This is very much the exception.
In the Civil War,
600,000 people were killed, a large segment of the nation was laid in ruin, resentment and hate were fused into the alloy of American life, and it was all in accordance with ideals of the previous Awakening.
The Revolutionary War was beneficial to Revolution-minded Americans, but to someone of British loyalty, or a Loyalist American, it was a disaster. There is nobody with sufficient knowledge to judge objectively whether it was good or bad for the human race as a whole.
Just because something is driven by idealism doesn't make it good. The 4T periods have tended to be marked by massive bloodshed, by families riven apart by ideological hatreds that seem trivial 20 years later, by economic, social, psychological, and emotional disruptions that sometimes leave scars that last for decades, and they don't always even end in decisive peace.
Yeah, it's really 'cool' to be a civilian on the home front, dreading that phone call/telegram/whatever from Uncle Sam, the one that goes "Dear Mr/Mrs. whatever, we regret to inform you that your son..."
It's really cool when veterans lose arms, legs, eyes, etc to near-misses (in the sense that they survived).
The land mines, poisonous chemicals, and nuclear radiation (a possible new note for the upcoming 4T!) are really 'cool' when they linger to poison, kill, and maim civilians, including children, who never even had anything to do with the 4T to begin with.
Even in World War II, probably the 'best' of the 4T wars, I'm sure it was very 'cool' when Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Berlin, etc were bombed, and
infants in their cribs burned to death in each city.
On 2002-03-27 12:21, Donna Sherman wrote:
OK,Unravellings are rather superficial but I will say that I found the beginning of this 3T to be a nice, welcome, and refreshing change from the last 2T. I mean, I was done with all that navel gazing. And BTW, I will find the 4T a nice refreshing change from this 3T.
See above.
Awakenings are all about the out of the box thinking, and ideology, and opinions, and questioning the status quo. But not much gets done during Awakenings.
Awakenings are fun or annoying, depending on your point of view.
Fourth Turnings are waking nightmares.
I don't mean to sound harsh on you or anyone else, but sometimes all this gauzy talk about how great it'll be to get to 4T rubs me the wrong way. If I've given offense, my apologies, it wasn't intentional.
But I mean what I said.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: HopefulCynic68 on 2002-03-29 12:26 ]</font>
