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OPINION
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Everything Is Worse Now

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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Have you noticed how things – institutions, products, services – just don't work like they used to? Now, I'm old. I was literally born the last week of the Baby Boom. I grew up in the glorious '70s and '80s. I didn't know at the time that those decades would be the high point of American civilization. When we grew up then, we always thought things would get better. And the '90s were okay in a lot of ways, the Clintons notwithstanding. But if you look at the ‘90s in retrospect, we were doing a lot of drafting behind better times. We're living off the preceding decades' social, cultural, and economic equity. If you look at today, we have depleted those savings and are on a downward spiral.

I don't mean just politically, though obviously, we're on a downward spiral politically. Culturally, too, with weird perverts and creepy losers having enlisted the ruling class into normalizing their bizarre behavior and ideas. No, I mean just normal things in life are worse. Things don't seem to work as well as they used to. We once had a default assumption of societal function; now we default to expecting failure. You used to be able to get stuff done. You used to be able to accomplish basic tasks. Today, we have all sorts of computers, including computers more powerful than the Apollo moon mission (not unrelated, we haven't been back to the moon in half a century) that you can carry in the palm of your hand. That's a mixed bag. In some ways, things are easier. You can order airline tickets on your phone without driving down to the airport to print the damn things out. But in other ways, it's just plain worse. Look around at people. Half of them have their faces buried in screens. My face is buried in a screen as I type. Hell, you look at footage from a concert and half the people are filming what they should be looking at. Like somebody's going to go back and review his video of Coldplay.

Also, the fact that Coldplay exists is proof that everything is worse. Music in the 70s and especially the 80s rocked. 

Is service worse? People have been complaining about service for as long as people have been serving. We're always about 20 years behind the good old days, so with that in mind, you need to take my observations with a grain of salt. Oh, have any of you noticed how restaurants usually don't put salt and pepper out on the table anymore? You usually have to ask for them. Of course, that's when you can find a server. Now there are plenty of good waiters and waitresses out there, and we tend to get good service because we tend to go to the same places, and they know us and they take care of us. But there are a lot of places that don't seem to have any experience with customers anymore. You come in and want something, whether it's food or to try on clothing, or to buy a ham, and it's like the first time that's ever happened. They're baffled. Again, every generation complains that the current generation is providing lousy service. But we're objectively getting lousier service.

And we're burdened by a lot of it is obnoxious rules and regulations designed to make your life more difficult as a pagan sacrifice to the angry climate gods. It's tiresome to be asked if I want a bag for my groceries. No, I'll just juggle them as I walk out to my car. In my local city, you have to pay extra for a bag because otherwise the penguins will catch fire. And straws. Remember when straws worked? Remember when they didn't turn into pulpy paper mush? That's because they were made out of useful, practical plastic. They didn't disintegrate into goo, like Joe Biden in a deposition. We have the technology to make a straw that works, but we don't use it.

That's true of a lot of things, like appliances. Did you know that dryers can actually dry things? We mastered dryer technology decades ago. But now dryers don't dry, and washers don't wash, because they are underpowered on account of these stupid climate change rules. They want to do that to cars, too. Cars work fine now. Hell, they break down a lot less often than they did when I was growing up, so that's something that has actually gotten better. You can buy cars big enough to carry whatever you need or small if that's what you prefer. But the busybodies aren't satisfied with that. No, they want to make things worse. They always want to make things worse. They want to tell you what you can drive, and the excuse they use is the climate hoax. They want to take your gas car and make you buy electric ones. I like electric cars. Elon Musk made me a lot of money on electric cars. But I want to choose what I drive. The next things are mandatory kill switches in cars so you can't drive drunk and governors to ensure that you can't speed. Well, I don't need somebody mucking around on my vehicle because I'm not going to drive drunk. And I'm going to drive at the rate of speed that I think I need to. This is so obnoxious. Mind your own damn business.

Look at movies. We used to be able to go to a movie pretty much every weekend, and we did. Just the other day, I asked Irina, "What do we want to do tonight?" I then added, "We can't go to a movie because there aren't any good movies out." When I was growing up, you had two or three movies you actually wanted to see coming out every week, and more in summer and around Christmas. Now you go months between movies. I saw "Dune 2," so I've used up my allowance of movies that I might actually want to watch for this quarter. Most everything else out there is superhero idiocy made for borderline mentally defective children of all ages. Even worse are the little art films. I'm not going to pay 70 bucks – itself a problem – for two people to go to the movies to watch some boring crap about a differently-abled two-spirit of color overcoming the racist Christian gun owner conservatives' oppression of them. Not her, them.

There is a huge space in American politics for a return to normalcy. That was what Joe Biden pretended to be for. He would've been a popular president if he had actually delivered it. When I say "normalcy," I mean the America I grew up in, where you looked to the future and assumed things were getting better. It was an America where young people could afford houses and not have $200,000 in debt hanging around their necks for their gender studies degrees. It was an America where everything wasn't allegedly racist and sexist and where mediocre people didn't get ahead because their grandfather came from Papua New Guinea. That's the other thing. We've gotten away from merit in favor of equity. It used to be that the smartest and best people became our engineers. The smartest and best people became our doctors. The smartest and best people became our lawyers. Looking at Fani Willis, do you think that corrupt tub of goo got to be district attorney because she was the second coming of Perry Mason? No, she got it because she's a commie black chick. That's it. Those are her qualifications. I guess that she's fat gives her another box to check – for some reason, we're now supposed to pretend that giant people are attractive. Have you walked by a Victoria's Secret lately? Apparently, Victoria's Secret is now carbohydrates.

I'm tired of woke America. I'm tired of worse America. I want to get back to an America where everybody's equal and everybody gets ahead or falls behind based on his own efforts and talents. I want the nanny state jerks to keep out of my business, and I want products and services that are the most efficient possible rather than ones that pass muster with a bunch of grim-faced weather Puritans who are mad because my dishwasher actually cleans my dishes. Like I said, there's a huge political opportunity for the politician who brings back normalcy. And normalcy for America is optimism and prosperity, not this miserable nightmare that we're stuck in today.

Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the eighth volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel of terrorism in America, The Attack!

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