Mr Rogers came about in a homogeneous high-trust society. IMO that's not what todays society is. Today I would say we we have a multicultural polarized low-trust society, so Mr Rodgers model for masculinity does not apply today.
If that wasn't your intention, you'd probably want to know that putting the words "low-trust" and "multicultural" into assertions about American life constitutes a reactionary/neo-supremacist trope.
Says you, they're just words. If you don't agree you can go ahead and disagree. I won't comment about your rhetoric other than to say it's functionally ad-hominem. Calling something a trope is a also a pretty easy way to hand-wave away anything you don't want to think about.
>and spark a whole unproductive discussion about what it is we "trust" or "don't trust" about people
I would say that trust has not improved, I would say that race relations have not improved (probably deteriorated). Even you can probably agree with that?
Mr. Rodgers prescriptions for life are lovely but impractical, and they haven't helped society at all I would say.
Wait, how? It's specifically about your language, not you. If, hypothetically, he'd taken a little scroll through your older comments and happened to, purely hypothetically, run across some stuff about how slaves had room and board and the persistent racist oppression of white males and then jumped to a conclusion and called you a racist, that would be ad hominem.
But that's totally not what happened.
Since Mr. Rogers Neighborhood first aired in 1968? No, race relations are much better now. It's true that they've deteriorated in some respects in the last handful of years, but mostly that's a result of a desperate rearguard action by White supremacists as institutionalized racism and it's automatic acceptance by the masses has been further eroded, and even if the federal government role today is in some respects worse than in 1968, the overall state of race relations is not.
> Mr. Rodgers prescriptions for life are lovely but impractical
In what concrete respect? You've been waving around a lot of generalizations (false ones, at that) about societal differences between now and the past to explain why they might have become impractical having been valid in the past, but you haven't actually explaining what the actual impracticality in any of them is (or even what specific prescriptions you are criticizing); while the inaccuracy of your generalizations is a problem, a bigger problem is your failure to establish, or even concretely define, the problem that supposedly has developed with Rogers’ approach that you are using them to explain.
The proportion of interracial marriages as a proportion of all marriages has been increasing since, such that 15.1% of all new marriages in the United States were interracial marriages by 2010 compared to a low single-digit percentage in the mid 20th century. Public approval of interracial marriage rose from around 5% in the 1950s to around 80% in the 2000s. The previous sentences are copy-pasted from Wikipedia.
Public approval has increased likely in lockstep with how functionally illegal it is to not approve.
No, he didn't. The United States was neither homogeneous nor high-trust in 1968. In fact, it was about as far from that as it ever has been in the post-WWII period, present situation not excluded.
No, and neither did the intense social, political, and racial divisions in the US that were present in 1968.
Could those social, political and racial divisions be addressed by living in different polities?
I addressed what you said. If you had a point beyond that, it wasn't apparent.
> but I'll address yours:
No, you won't, even though my point was exactly what I said.
> Could those social, political and racial divisions be addressed by living in different polities?
That's not really germane to what I said, either on its own or in its context as a response to your claim about change since some time relevant to Mr. Rogers origins. It seems to be more a passive aggressive way of making a separatist point that your use of white nationalist code throughout the year has been trying to dance around rather than actually responding to any point of mine. But, I will respond to it:
(1) No, the divisions are to multidimensional and evolving for separar polities to be a viable solution; and, in any case, separate polities just shift internal conflict to external conflict, they don't resolve conflict except when the conflict is primarily about a desire for separate polities.
(2) While there have been occasional bits of retrograde, the broad course over time does that they can be, and largely are being, addressed without separate polities.
I disagree that internal conflict would become external as you say. I think that the reverse would happen, we could coexist more peacefully as no groups feel controlled or exploited by the other.
Also I'm not sure what the reason you insist that people you clearly hate must continue to live with you. There is the obvious fact that you can continue to control them and demographically dominate them at the polls (thanks to immigration). If they separate from you then you cannot do that, also you would become a very tiny minority in the multicultural society that remained, I think that doesn't sit well with you. My assumption is that you are white.
I suspect the opposite, the trend is getting worse and relations are becoming a powderkeg. I suppose time will tell who is correct.
I don't hate anyone, and I don't insist anyone “live with me”. The U.S. does not have exit controls nor do I favor imposing them. OTOH, the primary cleavage lines in the country aren't geographic (whike there is a geographic correlation, it's weaker than at any point in history), so any separation of poltiies means (even ignoring the multidimensional nature of the divided that make this impractical even before considering geography) either forcing large numbers of people into polities less friendly to themselves than the current common polity or mass dislocation.
> There is the obvious fact that you can continue to control them and demographically dominate them at the polls (thanks to immigration).
The idea that currently dominant faction is advantaged by immigration is...interesting. But not particularly well connected to reality for many of the major divides at issue.
> If they separate from you then you cannot do that, also you would become a very tiny minority in the multicultural society that remained
In a separation along any of the key cleavages, everyone would be part of a larger (proportional) group within the resulting poltiies than the source polity, so that doesn't even make sense.
> My assumption is that you are white.
Well, maybe you shouldn't make stupid assumptions.
> I suspect the opposite, the trend is getting worse and relations are becoming a powderkeg.
I think there's a fairly good chance of a near term crisis and it's clear that the short-term trend is bad, as it has often been within the longer-term improvement. OTOH, The major progress has always come in the context of crisis periods.
Mister Rogers Neighborhood was airing during the LA riots, during the Attica riots, during the height of Vietnam, during 9/11, during Watergate, etc.
Issues of racial resentment and hatred were dealt with, head on, by Mr. Rogers in Mister Rogers Neighborhood.
The television series continued until 2001, a year when the cultural and racial makeup of the USA was very similar to what it is today. The core message remained the same.
Fred Rogers was critical of it even back then. Since then, consumption culture has exploded, objectification of women, violence, escapism whether it is in games, drugs or your social media, news streams is at an all time high. For a Fred Rogers type message to get through the volume dial on all this other stuff has to be dialed down. Otherwise the very valuable message gets lost in the noise.