Are We Living in at a History Turning Point

When I read the paper this morning, I was struck by the unsolvable and seemingly unresolvable dilemma of housing coming at us. There is a tsunami of people approaching retirement with only social security and housing costs have outrun them. There is another set of homeless people and public money for them is evaporating. Then we all know about the sinking stock market and we all wonder how the tariffs, etc., will be resolved. 

Historians, and of course every person and every family, have a view of "turning points" in history. Scrolling on sites today were discussions about a couple of periods that were, perhaps, even bigger that today. One was the Reformation. Shakespeare lived about that time and his plays reflected religious dilemmas he sensed were around him. His characters represented good and evil. Yet, he seemed not to be certain that evil was punished and good rewarded. At the time of the Referendum Catholic priests, at least some of them, represented evil. Luther came along riding the white horse of justice. Luther's branch became Protestants and thrived. But the Catholics thrived also. 

The other tuning point was the end of the Civil War and the two overarching views of "good" humans,  both reinforced in the Bible. Columnist Helen Cox Richardson wrote a beautiful essay about this period in U.S. history. The North, we over simplify, saw slavery and inequality as an evil. The South saw the white race as superior by birth and that it should remain dominant over the Negro. That the North, with the morally superior view should have set the country on a straight line toward a higher moral plain. But, it did not. For the next 100 years factions tried to keep in place an inferior standing for black people.

Today various narratives have taken a place in our political system far above where they have been previously. One is that previous immigrants were good and that new ones are bad. Another is that individual people do not know how to buy things that are good for themselves and that government, especially the current President, knows what is best for each person. I'm guessing it will take a while for one side or the other in these narratives to prevail--the turning point will have more or less past. 

Prior to the Reformation and the Civil War, perhaps few thought it would ever come to that. It's the same today. We were all left older and wiser by the Reformation and Civil War and no doubt the same will be true of tariff wars.