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http://www.lincolndailynews.com/images/frontpage/killebrew2.jpgAmerican values related to issues


By Jim Killebrew

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[February 20, 2015]  America has been considered a "melting pot" of culture with the assimilation of multiple cultures forming the American culture. Even though our history has a great deal of influence on our thoughts and behaviors, out country still consists of those generations of people who are alive and well during our current time. When issues like ISIS, world unrest, political differences, economic concerns, racial relations, education, or any other issue we might experience in our daily lives, we must remember we each are operating from a foundation of values we have developed and lived by from the moment we became aware of our personal relationship to the world around us. As our values were clarified and our personalities were developed, we formed various attitudes that contained not only our thoughts, but our actions as well. It is those collective perceptions with which we must deal when considering solutions to every issue we face in today's 21st century world. The span of people alive today represent the generations from America's Great Depression up through today's headlines.

In the Great Depression the American dream had become a nightmare. What was once the land of opportunity was now the land of desperation. What was once the land of hope and optimism had become the land of despair. The American people were questioning all the maxims on which they had based their lives - democracy, capitalism, individualism. The best hope for a better life was California. Many Dust Bowl farmers packed their families into cars, tied their few possessions on the back, and sought work in the agricultural fields or cities of the West - their role as independent land owners gone forever. Between 1929 and 1932 the income of the average American family was reduced by 40%, from $2,300 to $1,500. Instead of advancement, survival became the keyword. Institutions, attitudes, lifestyles changed in this decade but democracy prevailed. Democracies such as Germany and Italy fell to dictatorships, but the United States and its Constitution survived.

Economics dominated politics in the 1930's. The decade began with shanty towns called Hoovervilles, named after a president who felt that relief should be left to the private sector, and ended with an alphabet soup of federal programs funded by the national government and an assortment of commissions set up to regulate Wall Street, the banking industry, and other business enterprises. The Social Security Act of 1935 set up a program to ensure an income for the elderly. The Wagner Act of 1935 gave workers the legal right to unionize. John L. Lewis founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and conditions for blue-collar workers improved. Joseph P. Kennedy, a Wall Street insider, was appointed Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commissions.

By the beginning of the next decade the United States had gone from a laissez-faire economy that oversaw its own conduct to an economy regulated by the federal government. The debate over which is the best course of action still rages today.

The 1940's were dominated by World War II. European artists and intellectuals fled to the United States from Hitler and the Holocaust, bringing new ideas created in disillusionment. War production pulled us out of the Great Depression. Women were needed to replace men who had gone off to war, and so the first great exodus of women from the home to the workplace began. Rationing affected the food we ate, the clothes we wore, the toys with which children played.

After the war, the men returned, having seen the rest of the world. No longer was the family farm an ideal; no longer would blacks accept lesser status. The GI Bill allowed more men than ever before to get a college education. Women had to give up their jobs to the returning men, but they had tasted independence.

The end of World War II brought thousands of young servicemen back to America to pick up their lives and start new families in new homes with new jobs. With an energy never before experienced, American industry expanded to meet peacetime needs. Americans began buying goods not available during the war, which created corporate expansion and jobs. Growth everywhere. The baby boom was underway...

The sixties were the age of youth, as 70 million children from the post-war baby boom became teenagers and young adults. The movement away from the conservative fifties continued and eventually resulted in revolutionary ways of thinking and real change in the cultural fabric of American life. No longer content to be images of the generation ahead of them, young people wanted change. The changes affected education, values, lifestyles, laws, and entertainment. Many of the revolutionary ideas which began in the sixties are continuing to evolve today.

The chaotic events of the 60's, including war and social change, seemed destined to continue in the 70's. Major trends included a growing disillusionment of government, advances in civil rights, increased influence of the women's movement, a heightened concern for the environment, and increased space exploration. Many of the "radical" ideas of the 60's gained wider acceptance in the new decade, and were mainstreamed into American life and culture. Amid war, social realignment and presidential impeachment proceedings, American culture flourished. Indeed, the events of the times were reflected in and became the inspiration for much of the music, literature, entertainment, and even fashion of the decade. Legalized abortion had its birth in America.

The 1980s became the Me! Me! Me! generation of status seekers. During the 1980s, hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and mega-mergers spawned a new breed of billionaire. Donald Trump, Leona Helmsley, and Ivan Boesky iconed the meteoric rise and fall of the rich and famous. If you've got it, flaunt it and You can have it all! were watchwords. Forbes' list of 400 richest people became more important than its 500 largest companies. Binge buying and credit became a way of life and 'Shop Til you Drop' was the watchword. Labels were everything, even (or especially) for our children. Tom Wolfe dubbed the baby-boomers as the 'splurge generation.' Video games, aerobics, minivans, camcorders, and talk shows became part of our lives. The decade began with double-digit inflation, Reagan declared a war on drugs, Kermit didn't find it easy to be green, hospital costs rose, we lost many, many of our finest talents to AIDS which before the decade ended spread to black and Hispanic women, and unemployment rose. On the bright side, the US Constitution had its 200th birthday, Gone with the Wind turned 50, ET phoned home, and in 1989 Americans gave $115,000,000,000 to charity. And, Internationally, at the very end of the decade the Berlin Wall was removed - making great changes for the decade to come! At the turn of the decade, many were happy to leave the spendthrift 80s for the 90s, although some thought the eighties TOTALLY AWESOME.

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The 1990s were truly the electronic age. The World Wide Web was born in 1992, changing the way we communicated (email), spent our money (online gambling, stores), and did business (e-commerce). In 1989, 15% of American households had a computer. And by 2000, this figure increased to 51%, with 41.5% online. Internet lingo like plug-ins, BTW (by the way), GOK (God only knows), IMHO (in my humble opinion), FAQS, SPAM, FTP, ISP, and phrases like "See you online" or "The server's down" or "Bill Gates" became part of our everyday vocabulary. We signed our mail with a :-) smile, a ;-) wink, or a :-* kiss. And - everyone had a cell phone.

The electronic age continued to flourish. Everyone had a computer, iPhones and “smart” phones became of age along with “flat-screen plasma” and “High Definition” everything. A significant event was the 911 attack on the World Trade Center in New York by terrorists. This started a decade of war with the build-up of the military as the “War of Terror” changed the “doctrine” of the United States to assume “pre-emptive” wars using the 911 attack as the first cause. The economy began the decline with a recession beginning in late 2007 after the election of the new Obama Administration. The national debt began to climb with unprecedented spending.

By looking at the socialization decade the people in the particular age group have lived through, and the significant emotional events each significant decade provided, we can see the impact culture has made through the decades related to people’s perceptions and their preferences for various responses to issues of the day.

For example, for the group of people born in the late 1940s who were in the socialization decade of 1955 – 1965 would have experienced the impact of the completion of a world war and the Korean conflict. Family members would have experienced those things directly and would have talked and told stories of their experiences. The toys that person played with would have the army theme and much patriotic feelings that would have influenced their feelings and actions regarding national pride. Little girls would have “played house” and played with dolls; the little boys would have played cowboys and Indians and war games. Movies would have extended the theme of war and victory, medial would have reported on the post-war growth, the peace dividends of the Eisenhower Administration with the men making the living while the women raised the children. As the child grew into the America under the Kennedy Administration and the “Military Industrial Complex” and the “Cold War” with the shadow of the USSR, the loom of atomic warfare likely drove some into an underground bunker. While in school the Bible would have been read, the flag would have been honored by the saying of the pledge. Media beyond the radio was coming to life with television being introduced on a massive scale with more households owning them.

Contrast that with persons who were born in the late 1980s and early 1990s who were in the socialization decade of 1995 – 2005. They have experienced socialization totally immersed in electronics, instant communication, music produced more with electronics than voices, songs that use only phrases repeated over and over driven by a beat that produces an almost hypnotic effect, especially when the lights, stage fog and pyromaniac effects are present. The emotional significant event was the 911 terrorist attacks which changed the innocence of America. Although those people experienced the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it could be done at a distance unless the person or immediate family had volunteered to go into the military.


When viewing these different perceptions we must remember that each had families and friends who had experienced previous socialization periods that produced different perceptions in the individual. Within each individual’s respective family and community settings as they passed through their respective socialization periods, the changing culture had a great impact on their development of personality and values. It is not unreasonable to expect that each person looking at issues of today is at least thinking about past experiences and their personal values regarding each issue that comes up in culture.

Now, how does all this affect the society in which we are living today? For sure we view our society as multicultural, but it is also “multi-generational” as well. But I wonder if we miss a huge point by thinking the culture is only the “culture of today?” We are not only multi-generational; we are “multi-cultural” in our values, even if Caucasian has been our predominately physical ethnicity; and that culture is American culture extended over decades of experience. But ethnicity has changed in our culture to include ethnic groups who share their own experiences from their home cultures, or perhaps a repressed American culture for their ethnicity group, and are reluctant to "assimilate" their culture into what has been a predominately Caucasian culture.

Therefore, as we grapple with these issues of world and domestic events and America's response to those events, and with our alignment with external and internal groups and organizations, we need to keep in mind we have a variance of Americans, like it or not, who have been affected by the cultures (decades) in which they have lived and each person’s ethnocentrism produces a discontent and feeling of anxiety at the introduction of each change brought to them (us).

[By JIM KILLEBREW]

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