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Luckily, your culture will die eventually through your youths anyway. It won't be this generation. It may not be the next. But there will come a day where every
by caslon 3y ago
Luckily, your culture will die eventually through your youths anyway. It won't be this generation. It may not be the next. But there will come a day where everything you value within your own culture is gone. The accents will fade and the values will shift. It's the really beautiful part about the constant and inevitable internationalization of culture. It'll happen to Hawaii, it'll happen to Kentucky.
It may be sped along by transplants, making more money than Kentucky is willing to pay its citizens, rich in comparison after moving to cheaper areas, but, almost insidiously, the vast majority will just come from children deciding to join the rest of the world, in the same way entire languages have died, let alone American subcultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_extinction#List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...
You mention your churches, and those are dying too, if you look at trend graphs: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/state/kentucky/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...
A really beautiful part of the process is how little you can actually change it. Regardless of whatever laws you push, regardless of any cultural loathing you have, Californication is inevitable. Your universities have thousands of international students, but if you get rid of them, children will still follow the trends of the rest of the world.
The most you can do is cross your fingers and hope that the inevitable doesn't lead to cultural "natives" being outpriced and left behind.
I'm not from California and I've never lived there; this isn't coming from a position of feeling scorned over not being welcome; I have spent less than a week in total of my life outside of the borders of states bordering Kentucky and Kentucky itself.
In person, it's unlikely you would see me as particularly distinct from your culture. I spent the day stitching wounds in myself and others from an accident that occurred while performing physical labor outdoors. Half of the people I talk to on a daily basis are tied intimately to their respective churches, one of them a pastor. I'm not particularly liberal. I frequently have dinner with neighbors, as conservative as they come.
It's just incredibly funny to see the death rattle of a culture; "stay the hell out" doesn't matter when your descendants a few steps down the line will be indistinguishable from Californians without a single Californian needing to enter your state at all. It's happening to the Indians, who had the same attitude and much more cultural distinction; it's happening to you.
- HopperSpeaker 3y agoYour world view decries a youthful attitude to the lessons of history. The cycles of history ran before 1950... The pendulum between attitudes to morales and conservatism does not always go in one, extinction-laden direction. Just look at the continuous rise and fall of conservative Christian views and norms, which has typically risen in times of scarcity and danger, and fallen with abundance. In the cycle of history, like Rome, wealth tends to grow as morales have reduced in their significance for managing society, only for the pendulum to be reset entirely by a populist figure or revolutionary, or through reforms that forcibly redistribute and tax wealth (as in the history of Rome). There is no single human force more powerful than fear meeting order, which is another description for the typical seed of conservatism. A great example is Christianity in the UK: There were periods of persecution (hence many groups in the US now extinct in the UK), and periods of lax morales, largely driven by the economy and success of the local and world economy. Contrast that with Ireland which has similar religious dynamics except religion remains culturally important to the current older generation, which is about 3-6 generations from the famine caused by the UK there and which reinforced religion. In chaos and lack of order, people turn to religion(faith that is unprovable). It can be a person, a deity, a system. This can happen in the west again. It happened many times in Rome with their sweeping reforms. The idea that culture in a place like Kentucky, which in its fundamental conservative essence, has much in common with countries spanning centuries, and in practice, implements a type of society with more secure order, ending up dominated by culture from the most progressive aspects of the US would follow a trend, but only in the short term of history in the last 70 years. Events that could easily reset the conservatism clock 30-100 years, according to history, include major wars, civil war, or inequality reaching levels where chaos enters the fray. Read about Tiberius, Crassus, Caesar and Gaius in Rome. Germany became more conservative out of a false fear, described in horrible terms of disease. But whatever the cause and speaker, it illustrates how a society losing order, whether through falling economically behind their peers or with a minority against whom to direct the anger of inequality, often turns to inequality. People in the grip of fear don't see logic. In the 1920s, Germany was amongst the more liberal of countries in many ways, ironically. You should really read Will Durant - Lessons of History and the chapters on the rise and fall of civilisations, cultural transformations and how inequality almost always leads to significant (and generally conservative) reform to order. Maybe you will disagree with the examples, find those omitted, or you will find you can't comprehend how redistributing wealth often leads to a more conservative society obsessed with norms and order - but history is history. I suggest if you really care about the country and citizens of this country remaining safe, you would like to investigate how civilisations fail and end up slaughtering internally, and aim to avoid that fate for your country.