Why we occupy: David Brin explains that 1957 was NOT better than today (but we could still use a little more change)

 Not everything is better

But to be fair… I admit that some things today are worse today than they were in 1957!  Here are a few examples.

1957: Thalidomide babies are born armless. The bald eagle almost vanishes. Unregulated, toxins leak into waterways like Love Canal. Lakes are dying everywhere. School kids cry because the airhurts to breathe. Polio so terrifies parents that they keep children locked inside during summer, forbidding them from going to the public pool. (I remember it all.)

But in 1957 wise and good people dream of an era when scientists can help us all figure out what substances work and which ones do harm. Following 1957′s Sputnik scare, all Americans think scientists are wonderful! Soon, Jonas Salk is the most popular man in America.

2011: Ungrateful imbeciles rage against science, following radio  ignoramuses into snits against vaccination, economics, meteorology, evolution, medicine and biology. Science has made terrific progress and we know tons more! Blue America keeps getting healthier and living longer. It’s an age of real wonders and American science literacy is second only to Japan’s.

But meanwhile, there’s another America – that keeps smoking and shovels down pork rinds, while self-righteously screeching that liberals are ordering them what to eat – (a damned lie).  And they die young.

And the War Against Science   (and every other profession that knows stuff — like journalists, teachers, doctors, professors, civil servants, attorneys and skilled labor) rages on. Yep, some things are much worse.

1957: The greatest enemy of freedom and enterprise is Soviet Communism. A terrible threat and an evil empire! Democratic president Truman establishes NATO, the Marshall Plan and containment as national policy. Republican president Eisenhower maintains consistency and establishes a tradition of consensus negotiation between parties. Disparities of income and wealth (among whites) are at the lowest point in all of human history. The rich pay a lot of taxes, yet still have plenty to invest in the most vibrant capitalism of all time. Under Rooseveltian tax rates and regulation, the middle class grows by leaps and bounds.

Yes, there are Joe McCarthys on the right. But there are also Buckleys and Goldwaters who love science and intellect and negotiation and the kind of respectful argument that features – above all – curiosity and an eagerness to learn. Likewise, liberals and democrats utterly reject  communism. Extremism is dumb. Moderation is in.

2011: Communism is gone and the far left is a joke. The greatest enemy of free enterprise is a cabal of 500 billionaires  who appoint each other to director boards, protect each other and vote each other mega compensation packages, no matter how poorly the company does. They combine to take over American politics through secret slush funds and to finance culture war. Anyone who complains is pushing “class war.”

The nation is sucked into a decade of trillion dollar quagmire wars of attrition in Asia — but for the first time in our nation’s history the rich refuse to help pay for a desperate military struggle. The nation is deliberately ripped by Culture War, weakening us worse than anything has since the Civil War.

OKAY, SOME THINGS ARE WORSE. I admit it.

On the other hand… I must recall that in 1957 there were vastly more awful voices on the crazy right than the jerk who wrote this “comparison.” Men who fulminated against Martin Luther King and desegregation, instead of claiming (as Glenn Beck does today) that “we invented civil rights and Dr. King was one of us!”

Men who called it a commie plot to assert that cars made smog.  Who screeched that only communists thought that tobacco caused disease. Jerks who helped cancer-causing companies to lie about it for an entire generation. Men who promised to get us off the habit of wastefully suckling the teat of foreign oil states… only to do everything in their power to keep us hooked.

Yes, 1957 was a better time…for crazies. But we still have plenty of those, and they are trying hard to catch up to the good old days.