Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Violence in America has declined so much that I feel like I'm living in a different country than the one I grew up in.

https://twitter.com/pewresearch/status/1084133413483937792

2/When I was a kid, it was just assumed that fighting was a thing everyone did. Kids at my school got disfigured and disabled in fights. Kids drove around with guns. And we all knew that this was one of the safest towns; cities were assumed to be no-go zones.

3/Movies like "Escape From New York" (a little before my time but still representative) would show cities descending into chaos. Everyone assumed that things would just get worse and worse.

imdb.com/title/tt008234…

4/Futuristic novels like "Parable of the Sower" depicted an America that would just slowly become more and more violent and anarchistic until it fell apart.
amazon.com/Parable-Sower-…

5/The idea of violence was so normalized that it permeated our pop culture. Songs about kids fighting sounded like a lot of fun!

6/Anarchy was fun!

7/Looking back, I think we inured ourselves to the reality of violence by turning it into a cartoon in our minds. By laughing at it and affecting a Joker-like attitude.

And keep in mind, we were the sheltered suburban kids...

8/We all knew that cities were much worse. We assumed gangster rap was a chronicle of reality. We knew the violence there was orders of magnitude greater than anything we ever saw. We saw the L.A. riots on TV, and songs like this didn't seem unrealistic:

9/New York City had 2,245 murders in 1990. A murder rate 9 times as high as it is today.

That's...a war.

10/The fall in violence in America was something that (I think) we didn't realize was happening until it had already happened.

At some point in my 20s I walked around New York and thought "Wow, this place is really peaceful and safe. What happened to New York??"

11/I started noticing that young people just seemed less tough. The I-don't-care-about-anything attitude that I think we had affected as a defense mechanism against violence started to be replaced with an almost embarrassing earnestness. Emo kids became a thing.

12/You could see the change in murder rates, of course, but murder is just one very extreme, easily-measured manifestation of violence.

Every kind of violence - fights, muggings, people throwing bottles at you from pickup trucks for no reason - was far more rare.

13/There are still pockets of America that are extremely violent (St. Louis, where most of my extended family lives, is an example). Going there is like stepping back in time.

14/But outside those pockets, for most of the people who grow up in 21st century America, the ultra-violence of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s will be just a legend - something they can see in the statistics but will never deeply, intuitively understand.

15/The magnitude of the improvement in a human life from growing up without ubiquitous violence is hard to comprehend, I think. It's just enormous.

We have to work hard to extend the blessing of a nonviolent childhood to every kid in America.

16/One big step is the change the way police interact with citizens.

Oakland, for example, seems to have made a big positive change.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1015780655030915074

17/A massive effort to clean up environmental toxins like lead, especially in poor communities, is another top priority (and it's part of the Green New Deal, I might add!).

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

18/America has made enormous, civilization-altering progress against violence. Now we have to finish the job we started in the 90s, by bringing the blessings of peace and nonviolence to every kid in America.

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