What Is Going To Unite US?

What event is going to reunite Americans? What has to happen before we stop allowing ourselves to be divided from our fellow Americans? What can we do to reunite our communities. What common cause can we all get behind, support and sacrifice our easy and convenient lives for?

Last night I was thinking about how our society has radically changed in the past 50 years. The adult population during the 1950's were wary of government, believed in achieving their desires by hard work and savings. Credit was considered by a majority to be the work of the devil. Modesty, courtesy and respect were expected as a social norm. People "made do", invested their time and energies in making their own food, clothing, etc. Public programming was still censored for nudity, language and content. Etc.

I'm no expert on the 50's or even the 60's but I remember how the grown ups used to talk. They were very involved politically at the ground floor, in their communities and very vocal about their suspicions of government power gaining more control over our personal affairs. The nightly news hour was actual journalistic reporting of events by unbiased reporters (I think?)

Then I read about the 60's (I was born overseas in 61), how hollywood and the war changed the fabric of our culture detrimentally. Everything the 50's stood for was turned upside down in the 60's. An entire generation was influenced to radically resist what was once the commonly accepted attitude. What happened? What influences were so powerful as to be able to subvert an entire generation's values?

Most people realize that something drastic has got to happen very soon to prevent complete annihilation of life as we know it. But what?

We have been divided along every conceivable line of thought, principle and value so that today, our children have created an entirely new language, refusing to accept the parameters the adults require they fit into.

What has to happen to unite us? How can we overcome our propagandistic, lying, manipulative, greedy, biased, prejudiced, and selfish attitudes?

The last time we were "united" it was under brute federal force.

I suppose battling against that force would create a sense of unity.

As far as happy-go-lucky-hold-my-hand-and-sing-kumbaiya unity goes that would be catastrophic. It would require a massive cultural raping. America is too large and Americans are too diverse. There isnt any one simple thing that could possibly unite us all. The base culture here changes to incompatible degrees just traveling an hour or so by car.

What event is going to reunite Americans? What has to happen before we stop allowing ourselves to be divided from our fellow Americans? What can we do to reunite our communities. What common cause can we all get behind, support and sacrifice our easy and convenient lives for?

Nothing, because that's apparently not how humans operate. What you're asking for is against the grain of human nature. The only thing that can unite us in the manner you have in mind, is a perceived threat against our basest commonalities we all share. For instance, the strong showing of solidarity after 9/11. Despite our subdivisions - we are all Americans, and an attack on America was an attack on us all. This unification didn't last long, but it was there. Ronald Regan also touched on this subject when he made his famous comment about alien invasion and how quickly it would unite current enemies... because it would be an outside threat to our common humanity.

According to a study by Robin Dunbar at the University of Liverpool, primate brain size is determined by social group size. Dunbar's conclusion was that the human brain can only really understand a maximum of 150 individuals as fully developed, complex people (see Dunbar's number). Malcolm Gladwell expanded on this conclusion sociologically in his book, The Tipping Point. According to these studies, then, "tribalism" is in some sense an inescapable fact of human neurology, simply because the human brain is not adapted to working with large populations. Beyond 150, the human brain must resort to some combination of hierarchical schemes, stereotypes, and other simplified models in order to understand so many people. ~ Wikipedia

Further, what you refer to as unity - others would see as totalitarianism. Unity only feels good if it's your goals that are being advanced through unification. To everyone else, it feels like slavery. Despite appearances, there have always been huge rifts in politics and ideologies that "threatened to tear America apart", and often expressed by fundamentalist hardliners who wouldn't budge or compromise their position. The only thing lacking these days, I'd suggest, is reasoning. But there's every indication that idiocy and dismissal of actual engagement of the issues in favor of attacking strawmen with extreme prejudice is just par for the course.

Everything the 50's stood for was turned upside down in the 60's. An entire generation was influenced to radically resist what was once the commonly accepted attitude. What happened?

If I had to take a stab in the dark, I'd say that two global wars the scale of which was unprecedented in human history, an utter economic collapse which brought poverty to the common man's doorstep, a horrifying genocide, the nightmarish unleashing of the nuclear genie on two cities, and an ensuing standoff between opposing ideologies capable of unleashing nuclear Armageddon on a hair's trigger forcing us into a "cold war" of subversion that shook the very foundations of our assumptions of security had a lot to do with it. The "old" foundations of society and politics were blamed as the cause of it all - and the youth generation rebelled against it as sheer madness.

The counter-culture revolution of the 60's draws it's roots directly from the youth-culture predecessors in the 20's, 30's, and 40's... but it wasn't until the 1950's that it really began taking shape and taking on a life of it's own.

Teaching children and stressing to the rest the importance of true critical thinking will make the situation better. If everyone is united, then we cannot truly progress as a society. The worlds biggest problem IMHO is most people follow lines of thought that are not thought out, people label themselves "Republicans", "Democrats", "Conservative" or "Liberal" ect.. Once someone labels themselves as part of an ideological group, they throw there own reasoning out the window and enter the flock.