[user982]

When I first read Asimov's Foundation, I thought the decline and loss of knowledge in the Galactic Empire within a few generations was unrealistically quick. It's been eye-opening to witness new parents who not only don't know that they're supposed to teach their children to read, but wouldn't know how to do so.

[hedora]

Also, the Portland thing.

We have cameras and planes and stuff. How is the idea that downtown is a burnt out hole in the ground full of rubble (or not) an actual controversy?

[pixl97]

Late GenXer here. I went from a place with pretty good schools to one with with pretty bad schools and a strong religious/honor culture background. I went from a humans can accomplish anything to one of we are damned at a pretty young age. It seems so many people are fact resistant from a young age.

[walkabout]

The people who need to find out aren't curious and aren't looking for proof that counters what they're inclined to believe. They won't check what locals are saying and the videos of nothing-much-happening they're posting. They watch the same handful of shocking crime videos on Facebook and are sure the cities are overrun with rampant lawlessness (and apparently the residents are just persistently too stupid, over decades, to do anything about it, voting-wise, and need the Federal Government to step in despite their protestations and save them? It's a puzzling world view if you think about it for even a second), watch Fox News showing b-roll of fire and violence from one city block on one night for weeks on end (or from another city and year entirely) and claiming that's the whole city all the time, see news sites doing the same (one infamously put a photo of early '90s LA riots at the top of one of these articles recently, JFC)

You can trace right-wing propaganda in the US painting cities as worse and more violent (and, specifically, overrun over by criminally-inclined immigrants who refuse to assimilate...) back to at least the early 20th century. The rhetoric from back then is uncannily familiar, as are the proposed solutions. But of course nobody who needs to realize that the "good old days of the good old days" were full of the exact same complaints (and we're all still here, everything turned out OK) will be curious & interested enough to find that out.