I figured I'd let your post marinate over the weekend, just in case you wanted to edit it before I responded.
I'm not sure if you're considering the bigger picture. Whether they were alive or not at the time, there are people longing for the days when:
- Women stayed in the kitchen and people of colour knew their place.
- Clergy, teachers, coaches and parents didn't sexually abuse kids...except they did, but nobody wanted to talk or hear about it.
- Women didn't get abortions...except they did...in back alley "clinics".
- People rarely divorced...because where else was an abused wife gonna go?
- The gays stayed in the closet and didn't have annual parades.
My use of the word "may" wasn't meant to cast doubt on the veracity of your assertion that conditions in your area used to be better. It just means that whatever is going on in Milwaukee - for better or worse - can't be taken as representative of conditions in the US as a whole.
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The thing is, that's not nationalism. Nationalism tends to be quite chauvinistic - people get put into groups and some people are "in" while others are "out". And, the in-group tends to assign itself the authority to decide who is in and who is out. While nationalism can be a unifier to get people singing from the same song sheet, it invariably creates its own problems.
Why do you think I have a problem with people behaving better? LOL! I know you're an intelligent person, so I'm disappointed that you present a cherry-picked statistic as if it reflects overall national trends.
What? So, now the US isn't so bad after all?
None of this ^ has anything to do with my post. But, now that you brought knife crime up...
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The little fishing village I grew up in was never very large. Crime wasn't an issue, because everyone knew each other, making it difficult to get away with anything. You say people didn't lock their doors when you were growing up. Well, when I was growing up, people didn't even bother
knocking and just walked right in!
I've lived in the Halifax area for the past 40 years. While there has been a recent uptick in the crime rate, it's still far below what it was 25 years ago.
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That said, many people around here have the "feeling" that crime is worse than it used to be. I blame social media and sensationalized newscasts for that.
I have never commented on any of those details- it should have been clear that the crimes being committed and the actions/decreased quality of people are where I have problems.
I have also made it clear that I was commenting about Milwaukee, not the nation- while I have been in many parts of the country, I wouldn't dare to comment about their crime stats to the same extent I do about MKE.
In the past:
- Kids stayed in school and tried to achieve good grades
- People worked, usually hard. They didn't sit on their asses and avoid it until a certain piece of legislation was passed. (don't shoot me, look at the data)
- Theft wasn't much of a problem until about 1967 and it hadn't really spread to the outlying areas but OTOH, the outlying areas were still farms. We didn't need to lock everything.
- People DID divorce, but it wasn't blabbed publicly unless they were celebrities- locally, it was spoken of more quietly, with much more shock.
- Small crimes actually shocked people- extreme crimes weren't common and those made people faint. A few were as bad as the worst that happen now but it wasn't made known nationwide for quite awhile.
- The media verified their statements with at least two extra sources- the closest most people came to social media was a 'party' telephone line or the bulletin board at a grocery or drug store
- People generally observed traffic laws and while some would have driven faster, they didn't because car handling made that unsafe but they also didn't want to die- that doesn't seem to be a concern, now.
In a country with an ever-growing population due mainly to immigration (the birth rate in most Western countries has been dropping for a long time), problems will come with the immigrants. Your fishing village may have had a few, but because everyone else knew each other and cared about the place, any problems with outsiders would have been short-lived. You all cared about the community, but here, people talk about 'the community', but I don't know how that word applies when so many rob, kill and do so many bad things to each other, on their own block.
Now, people don't care that they're breaking laws, they're in it for themselves.
I'm not saying this was Mayberry, but the city where I was raised didn't have problems coming from outside- if we had, and I already posted that the PD had a total of seven officers for three shifts), news of it would have spread in the little local newspaper.
I blame the media- everything has to be "You'll only hear it on WXXX", "Live, Local, Late-breaking" and rather than helping, the news crews stand by to record the events. Nationally, sensationalism is king and it's more an attempt at entertainment than news reportage.