Masks?

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(08-24-2021, 03:45 PM)Tiger Teeth Wrote: And through all of those, minus the Civil War, we were unified as a country much more than we are now.  My point here is that yes, we endured some shit in our history, but we are turning on one another like I've never seen in 57 years.

Were we? Or were we just a country that didn't have social media to amplify the extreme minority opinions so they can get picked up by 24 hour news cycles hunting the outrage clicks? And no pocket computers that can give you a 24/7 immersion in it all no matter where you are.

Things aren't worse. People are just being oversaturated with terrible news and minority opinions. It's been a thing much longer than Twitter, that's just kicked it into overdrive. Until the last year or two, violent crime rates were half of what they were in the 90s. There was a poll about perception of violent crime, and despite it having gone down pretty much every year for 25 years, over 60% of people believed it had gone up.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/179546/americans-crime-last-year.aspx