I think, in general, the "older" generations have the experience that getting things done takes work, not just rhetoric, where the "younger" generations think just having an idea is good enough. This is exacerbated in recent years because the internet makes everything "instant". This is why you get stories of young people getting jobs, wanting to change the world, and getting burned out in 6 months because they haven't changed the world yet. To borrow a phrase of some psychologist I can't remember, "[Young people] want to get to the top of Everest but forget there is a long climb."
For instance - I'd love better, more affordable health care. But you don't get it by the law that we had and then had changed - you get it by changing cultural incentives and making it easier to get basic care. But that takes a generation of changing the hold the AMA has on medical licensing, lowering barriers to entry to providing basic care, etc. It can't be done in a year or two.
I'm all for reducing gun violence, but it's not going to happen by issuing a law to ban guns or make it harder to get a license. It's going to be a generation of improving social interactions to avoid the kind of isolation and emotional pain that gives rise to the desire for such an action.
(I realize that reality is somewhere between the extremes of "generations" and "instant", and policy changes do help kick off the longer-term process. But I've no illusions that the policy changes are sufficient or will have "immediate" results.)
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4465593 times)