We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning, since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it
Billy Joel’s well-known, albeit sometimes-mocked, earworm track came out in 1989. The song, if nothing else, conveys the snowballing insanity felt in experiencing event after event piling upon each other. The inextinguishable fire – especially of man-made disaster – burned long before the listeners’ time and, accordingly, would continue sans any drastic change. Fast forward 40 years, and the fire still burns. Whether it’s all categorically worse or not is theoretical to an extent (though problems like climate change and man-made disaster are empirically worse); generational bias naturally brings us to view today’s problems as uniquely distressing relative to other times…..more
