Billy Joel - We Didn't Start The Fire (Official HD Video)

> "Ask people in their 20s and 30s what they think about the world, and over half of them will say the world's going to shit in one way or another. I know people on both sides of the political spectrum that will say that. This isn't a good sign for society." Do you know the song, "We didn't Start the Fire"? [1] Great song. It was released in 1989 - check out the lyrics. Even more interesting though is why the song was written. [2] Billy Joel was in a recording studio talking to a friend of John Lennon's son, who was 21 at the time. They had a conversation: - Friend: It's a terrible time to be 21 [because the world's going to shit] - Billy Joel: Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y'know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful. - Friend: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties. - Billy Joel: Wait a minute, didn't you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis? [1] - [VIDEO] [2] - [LINK]

Consider the early 20th century. Some ostensibly irrelevant political figure was assassinated which rapidly spiraled into the "war to end all wars" in which about 20 million people were killed, in a world population of 1.7 billion - so more than 1% of people. In relatively short order this led to the Great Depression in which over 10 years the global economy collapsed leading to mass suicide, starvation, and disorder. And we were just warming up. After that it turns out that the war to end all wars was just the pregame show. An eccentric vegetarian artist with a knack for riling up crowds decided to declare a literal genocidal war on the world, and for some time it looked very much like he was going to win. It only ended after another 80 million deaths (about 3% of the world population this time), the deployment of nuclear weapons, and countless war crimes. And then? Decades of people got to live in the great times where every day there was a real and legitimate concern of imminent nuclear war (which did nearly blast off multiple times) to the point that nuclear drills were a part of the classroom, and people building their own nuclear doomsday bunkers was not only not eccentric but just plain ole pragmatism. The point of this is not just to emphasize that the past was unimaginably and exponentially worse than the present in every imaginable way, but rather that there was no widespread mental health collapse. And there was no "shielding" kids from anything, when the world was

That's because you were young and had no idea what was going on. A hilariously depressing exercise is just reading old news paper headlines from whatever decade you want to pick and seeing what the world was like then. I've yet to see a decade where the average person wasn't a hairs breadth away from dying in various unpleasant ways, some musical accompaniment: [VIDEO]

Another comment somewhere else in this thread mentioned 2008 and the bailouts for banks, bankruptcy for the public, as the place we should look at. With big society wide trends like this it's impossible to have a clear cause and effect. It's all a muddle which is why I've listed a few different ideas all of which contribute in their own way. Covid is such a unique situation though and I think it will serve as a clear turning point where preexisting trends were shattered and others were turned up to 11. But ultimately, we didn't start the fire, but we can try to fight it. [VIDEO]