Public Affairs

4TH QTR travelers have lived through a lot of stuff. We had drills in grammar school to duck under our desks in case of an atomic bomb. We are the first group of people to live every day of our lives under the nuclear threat, and we actually felt it. This group has experienced the Korean War, the Eisenhower Presidency, Camelot, and the murder of JFK, RFK, and MLK. JFK’s assassination was a defining moment for many of us. Many of us joined the Peace Corp, or went overseas in other such programs. Earlier in the 60’s, we had lived through the Cuban Missile crisis, where, if not for a correct judgment here and there, by both Kennedy and Khrushchev, the world might have changed forever. No history book can adequately capture how we experienced those thirteen days.

We were shocked when our government sent the Marines to Vietnam, landing in Danang, in March, 1965. Most Americans had never even heard of Vietnam. Our generation grew up in the late 1940’s and 1950’s and we really did not know war. Some of us served, fewer yet in combat, and many did not. There are 57, 939 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. At least another 1.3 million soldiers and civilians died until the US left Vietnam in 1975. No thinking American was unaffected by this war.

During this time, the late 1960’s, we also engaged in another war, one on poverty. And another, the war on crime. Government activism in both of these areas had some successes and many failures. Some of us participated in those programs. Medicare was born during the 60’s. We had recessions, and we had economic growth. We had price controls put in place by Nixon, and then we did not. We watched a President get impeached, the same President who ended the stale mate of total conflict between the US and the USSR and between the US and China, cold war conflicts that had persisted for close to thirty years.

We saw great changes in the world. Here’s an example not frequently discussed. Starting in 1956, the US received in payment vast store of Indian rupees, a material percentage of the entire nation’s currency, acquired in exchange for US food exports. Under a program called PL 480, which by law did not allow the US to repatriate the rupees, the rupees stayed in India, and were reinvested in Indian development. India was starving. Today, its GDP exceeds $2.5 trillion, almost equal to the UK, the imperial power than controlled India until after WW II. The 4TH QTR generations lived through a handful of developments like India.

We lived before credit cards. We lived when your bank was never open on a weekend and the only place you could get cash was at a supermarket. Now we have global debit card exchanges and digital currency. The great inventions of our early time, in the middle 50’s, were copying machines and IBM mainframe computers, and then in 1980, fax machines. These machines did things we could not imagine. They fundamentally changed how we worked. At the same time, a military group known as ARPA was developing data communication protocols that evolved into the modern-day internet. Today’s technology built on that. We watched the world get flat. We road up with the dot.com bubble, and then road it down.

We supported our government as it used our military to enforce international principles regarding the sanctity of nation states when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and our government stopped when the mission had been completed.

We were humbled and vengeful about 9/11. We supported the immediate attack on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but many of us were puzzled by the buildup for another war in Iraq. The Afghanistan military combat presence is now our longest in history.

We have lived through the Great Recession, an event which caused almost all of us to rethink our financial preparedness for retirement. Some of us were badly hurt. Few of us were unaffected. Now we are living through one of the longest economic expansions in history.

The 4TH QTR view is built on this and hundreds of other profound experiences. If you are a thinking person, if you have paid attention, and if you want to help others to leverage your experience you might have some very valuable insights to share with your contemporaries who were not paying close attention, and for the generations of people who are behind you.

The public affairs forum addresses issues that affect everyone, experiences that we consume collectively, issues that we pay our governments to address, outcomes that might increase our quality of life or greatly reduce it. The more we know about these issues, the better job we will do selecting people to represent us in our legislative assemblies and represent us in leadership roles.