I suppose I was lucky enough to come of age during a relatively peaceful time of world history. I was born after Vietnam and the social strife of the 1970s. There was the Cold War of course, but we didn't obsess over it. If my philosophy-major math serves me correct, I was 10 years old when the Berlin Wall collapsed and 22 on 9/11. That is 12 years of fewer wars and enormous economic expansion throughout the world.

9/11 didn't shatter my world view but reinforced my belief that for all its flaws America is basically good and there are enemies out there to destroy. I had a suspicion that there was something wrong about the 2003 invasion of Iraq but nationalist feeling - not a bad thing in itself - overwhelmed whatever scruples I may have had. I was ready and willing to join the military but prior commitments kept me from making that mistake.

From as long as I can remember to 2015 or so my vision of the world was relatively untroubled: we are in a slow decline, yes, but there is no particular end in sight, no cliff over which we are about to fall.

Since then: the opioid crisis, the homelessness crisis, the rise of identity politics, Trumpism, anti-Trumpism, the Covid freakout, government sanctioned street-violence, government malice, government incompetence. Just read about some of the absurdities that the United States was paying for in Afghanistan - feminist toilets and George Floyd murals - to see just how stupid we have become.

In hindsight these things have been brewing for some time. For example, the opioid / homelessness problem can probably be traced back to the decades-long deterioration of manufacturing, wages, and marriage: a young man from a blue-collar background with no family to care for and no means of improving his economic position is a lot more likely to check out of life and dedicate himself to drugs and "urban camping".

The identity politics, street violence, and incompetence of the anti-government are perhaps traceable to a root-and-branch, Marx-inspired ideological rejection of the American tradition. For all its Marxist inspiration it marries up well with American capitalism, which is always destroying old things in order to sell new things. During the Cold War the United States decided to fight Marxism on its own turf: Marxism promised material and social progress, but capitalism actually delivered it. The old anti-Marxism, before the Cold War, was an appeal to God, family, and national tradition. The new anti-Marxism was just as much an abstract materialist dialectic as the ideology it was fighting.

Maybe history isn't speeding up so much as old bills are coming due.

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