A podcaster turned the camera on his own life and interviewed his mother. In terms of “how we got here”, this is an excellent view of that.
People were they good, yes. In a Time when the war was over and people found purpose in their life. America thrived and had golden years. America was one of the best countries that gave what everyone wanted ! Freedom !
No one can ever be like the USA in 1950’s not only USA had good years Europe had ended the war, Russia enter boom of relieve and economic freedom to start growing in that time in the end of the 50’s. USA started freedom and gave people freedom and it is why they grew so fast. They had Christianity and they were the fasted protestant country growing, no one history had what USA had. It was the best because God made it that way.
It had racism and perhaps the promblem of understanding social promblems of a growing super power they cannot fix and the foriegn policy of WW3 that could happen the atomic bomb dropped. He he he they said if you could put yourself under the desk you could survive a bomb they saw it that way now know we know if a bomb drops you die instantly and the land gets pioson. No no no no reality is the 1950’s were a time were science bloom and discovery to fights diseases made breaktrhu we have vaccines for polio, measles, and smallpox.
https://growinganation.org/content/show-content/prosperity_and_challenges/
I was thinking about the 60s and civics lessons in school, and national pride, and jumping under that desk lickity-split when the sirens went off, the polling place a few apartments down from ours. With that sacred election happening every other year.
Or my mom schlepping three kids all over Chicago, via CTA buses, museums were mostly free, or very cheap, and she loved them. We were poorish, but dad could buy used cars and had enough to put gas in them and drive us out into the country, even had a couple country road side picnics. So beautiful, and even the 70s/80s hitchhiking was fairly chill and people were fairly chill. Not everywhere of course, but most everywhere, even down by the Gulf Coast.
Now we’re looking down the barrel of mass disrespect, incivility, with its lawlessness, where’s that going to take our country in a time when our challenges are just starting to get really big?
There’s no escaping examples of that self-absorbed thinking. Here it is again. God made America? Why can’t we be serious?
USA became great, because this amazing landmass had room for people to grow families and cities, brimming with resources and opportunities, if one didn’t mind exterminated “primitive” peoples who got in the way.
Currently it’s failing because we’ve exhausting this wonderland as fast as possible, and as it turns out, without learning how to work with each other. In a time when cooperation will be more needed than ever, but everyone is off in their own land of confusion and fear.
Then they bring up God,
When god is self created.
A creature of your mind, which is why our Gods reflects our ego so well.
There is no personal God up there in the cosmos.
God exists in our hearts and minds.
What is happening upon our physical planet, its geology and biology is totally beyond Gods’ purview. Like the Bible and most other religions warn us humans, “God is beyond human understanding.”
Thinking one has the God almighty of time and Earth in their back pocket, or that they God’s warrior, is guilty of blasphemy and hubris.
Yeah, seems to me that comes down to why can’t we get over our love for war and destruction?
Pinker tells us murders are down, but state sponsored weapons of mass murder has never been more heinous. (That ignored other side of the coin.)
Or, what about human nature, over the past half century why have we humans been so incapable of challenging our primitive biological instincts, and inject a little rationalism into our decision?
If nations and leaders could hold themselves to the same behavioral standards we expect of our children, we might have looked at the other side of the coin, and inject some rationalism into our political and business discussion and decisions. To achieve enough wisdom to at least slow down with the obsessive race to nowhere but self destruction.
Instead of allowing progress and profits to force into this situation of growing self-cannibalism - we could have slowed down and started taking Earth’s complex systems into account. Such as recognizing the importance of externalities, and such.
Partner our marvels human minds with a business plan that priorities cooperation and nurturing natural systems and resources.
But guess, it’s way too late for that.
Back to 1950,
if you were a nice white family it was awesome, though I can’t really speak to them still as a five year old in 1960 I do remember the zeitgeist. From Chicago, with a mom who kept us busy we were regulars at the Museum of Science and Industry and most others. So my kid mind knew all about the discoveries and dreams our advertisers were feeding us.
Science and progress was the new God and it was beautiful and the stores kept getting filled with ever cooler stuff. (if you lived in the right country and neighborhoods and had the money.)
I believe one of the greatest mistakes was to refuse to look at the down side of all these modern marvels. It was always about the hard sell, chasing flash, and we never wanted to seriously talk about the costs and damages required for these new modern marvels?
We didn’t want to know, personified by the war on Tobacco, then the cottage industry dedicated to “Doubt is our Product” with the goal to confuse, slander and delegitimize any scientific information that got in the way of increasing profits. It was a ruthless campaign, that held “honesty” in the greatest contempt. Everyone who cared knew what was happening, but no one managed to do anything about it - selling the lie and going along, became normalized.
Some get real upset at me for daring to boil down our failing to human self-absorbed thinking and self-serving actions. But, how else to describe the past half century, or the past couple millennia for that matter?
Along with our general disregard for this planet and its other inhabitants, our empathy doesn’t extend much beyond family and tribe - even as we created an integrated global world economy.
When we truly started learning about Earth’s geology and biology and evolutionary reality, ~ 50s to 70s, we came to understand that our human society was putting strains on this planet’s biosphere that could not be sustained.
The global community of people was educated about global warming and Earth’s biosphere and resource limitations, and the strain of our expectations, and the concept of planning with seven generations in mind was introduced. That means being good stewards of our planet’s biological and chemical health to ensure that our children would inherit the same green vibrant planet
I was born into in the middle of the 1950’s.
Instead, they will inherit destructive extreme weather roulette as a way of life. And I shouldn’t be harsh?
Instead of partnering our brains with Earth’s processes, and constructively preparing for the changing climate, we turned our collective backs.
Hollywood Reagan cheated his way into kicking the engineer Carter’s butt, and we never looked back, to heck with green: Greed is Good!, too much is never enough!, Fk those scientists and tree hugger!
We the people obviously voted for the big party, Disney World and the Super Bowl for everyone, ( 
who could afford it) with Hollywood dreaming for the rest of 'em.
Good example of that old habit of: Only look at one sidism syndrome.
That milestones of prosperity could be accompanied by another eye opening list of lessons learned and forgotten, and with plenty of blind-sided dubious decisions made, some causing monstrous harm to others.
Not to mention the profiteers that always seem to find a way to manipulate assorted idealist pronouncements, goals and projects into schemes for personal enrichment.
Excuse the rambling, I’m still processing USA’s willful self destruction.
Sorry about the video Lausten, it doesn’t seem to want to open, think the internet is having a rough time. Will try to catch it later.
Excuse me for focusing on arikel88 remarks and where they took me.
Oh it’s finally started.
House wife gave us the good times.
But there was more going on.
This will be fun, but yeah, here we go, the other side of the coin.
This song of Dylan sums up many things
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Which means that America was a great country long before the Europeans arrived to spoil it.
U.S. Buffalo Slaughter Summarized In One Shocking Photo
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I rarely respond to him. He doesn’t consider any points of view outside of his own.
That existed on this continent long before Europeans got here. It wasn’t “introduced”, Europeans ignored and suppressed it in favor of expansion and short term gains. But ideas like that can’t be killed.
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Finally got through the video (internet weirdness) listening to the video, it was splendid, for what it was, being only 8 years younger to her I could relate to her stories about mom and back then via my memories.
29:00… post war, American’s Marshall Plan for white America - great insight.
The red listing thing, …
further down
Democrats did poop job of marketing (I’d add, Democrats have done poop job of defining & defending our values and initiatives. They stopped engaging people and got lost in Hollywood dreaming and super-cool.)
But again not a word in her appreciation of those days about this planet, or other factors that made the economy possible. Nothing about how we depend on and are bound up with healthy environment; or anything outside a very narrow slice of what was going on.
Self-absorbed and self-serving remains the key villain to deeper insights and appreciation.
I think we need to grapple with that nature within us - most others don’t.
At this point it doesn’t matter much, the chicken coop is being handed over to the vandals and wolves, now we simply get to wait and see how that works out.
All the while our Earth bound environmental disregard is stalking us with an ever more powerful punches.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you think I’m not aware of that?
The concept of planning with seven generations in mind was introduced to western society and political and business leaders.
Okay?
It was also summarily dismissed.
I’m never sure what you’re aware of. There is so much ancient wisdom like that, but you hardly ever refer to it. Most of our history, the last 200K, we had to listen to the forces of nature, or you died. It’s only recently that we got so good at extracting resources that it’s unsustainable.
Which is why I insist it’s time to learn new lessons, a little soul searching.
I know, remember the Woke thing, soul searching doesn’t go over well,
but do I care, it’s part of being a healthy human being.
For all your defense of all these great old thoughts and ideals, where has it brought us, to this Musk suggesting we build a city of a million on Mars. AI to do our thinking for us. Massively destructive failed mega projects right and left. For what, B. D. G’s?
Here’s the latest, ravings of a lunatic, but apparently a huge number of wealthy and politically powerful believe in him.
Then you get exasperated with me that I insist it’s important that we explicitly recognize our self-destructive, self-absorbed thinking, and self-serving nature. That man talking in front of the camera and that thinking personifies what I’m talking about.
His notion is as stupid, no! idiotic! - as selling the wonderful idea that you could take a few drops of blood and test it for everything, bs so good, folks can’t resist believing in it. And that’s were it’s at these days. The bigger the con, the more people love it. And you tell me something didn’t so seriously wrong with our thinking along the way.
What about Humanity’s Ultimate Challenge, the one scientific study and physical evidence placed in front of educated peoples across the globe - the much advertised revelation of the 1950s to '70 that our Earth was a global interwoven network of complex dynamic systems. Also that Earth had limits and that the trajectory of human expansion and consumption was on the way towards blasting through those limits. With ensuing increasingly difficult, then horrendous, cascading consequences, that such irresponsibility and neglect to address would result in.
I mean the first step to dealing with alcoholism is to recognize one is drinking too much.
Where is awareness and concern Earth systems and our biosphere in all of this future rama talk? It’s as though it simply doesn’t matter. But it does.
Heck recently you wrote some line implying we’d be around in a thousand years. That simply does not comport with Business as Usual, and it certainly doesn’t comport with a reality where people want to keep consuming and destroying in growing orders of magnitude more than we are already doing. It doesn’t compute.
Good find. This woman’s memories sound a lot like the stuff my parents told me about their childhoods. I’ve got to start by saying the “50s” lifestyle seems like it lasted up to the late 60s or so going by my parent’s lives.
My 1956 born mother lived in a close-knit neighborhood in Philadelphia. Here’s few things I remember her telling me that seem really crazy by today’s standards:
Kids used to walk home from school to eat lunch and then walk back.
My grandfather raised 7 kids as a mechanic and part-time cabbie. My grandmother didn’t have to work, so she was a “housewife” whom everyone loved. All the kids went to catholic school, which must have been much cheaper than it is now.
During summer nights, neighborhood kids would sometimes sleep in the local park because it was cooler than sleeping indoors.
My mother’s grandparents, as well as a few aunts and uncles lived in the neighborhood, so she saw extended family regularly and could always depend on them. It was the same for other kids she grew up with.
That era was better than today. No question about it. It was much better than my 80s-90s upbringing , and way, way better than the life kids have now. Boomers were lucky to have had that stable upbringing, and they wouldn’t have been able to go as far as they did without it.
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Those aren’t the things I’m exasperated with.
Never said that. I talk about the things that are wrong with our thinking, that have been wrong with our thinking, and things we’ve learned about our thinking.
That’s a good question.
I don’t know how you can be so certain about the future. I don’t expect things to be rosy but it would take a lot to wipe 8 billion people.
Has to do with geophysical facts of life and what we know because scientists have done an excellent job of deciphering Earth’s conditions during the past.
Earth’s systems, our impacts: Understanding global change | Aspen Global Change Institute
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/human-impact-on-the-earths-surface/#google_vignette
But beyond that look at the past, how long do you think exponential growth can go?
Where is there any serious will to do anything significant, heck even token measures are under increasing attack, while going to Mars has become a thing.
Because . . .
I’m attentive to how people think, talk and behave,
I’m not into faith based thinking,
I’m a treehugger and apparently pay way more attention to Earth’s biosphere, and have learned more about her Evolutionary history than most others,
I believe Earth scientists and climate scientists way more than I do philosophers and pundits.
We had a half century to start turning this super tanker around - by now a good future requires a radical U-turn no one will accept. It’s simple math, sans the wishful thinking.
Michael Mann - “ Our Fragile Moment:
“The hockey stick emphasizes the relative stability of the global climate over the common era, the period during which much of our civilizational infrastructure was developed. But evidence is growing that suggests we are rapidly leaving this era of climate stability—we find now ourselves in what I’ve termed our “fragile moment.” There is still time to preserve that moment, but only if act with the urgency the climate crisis demands. Among other things, we need to demand more ambition from our elected leaders when they gather to meet next month at the COP28 international climate summit in Dubai, possibly the last opportunity to negotiate the emissions reductions necessary.”
Check out, what happened and didn’t happen at COP28.
An unprecedented number of lobbyists with ties to the fossil fuel industry were granted access to COP28, according to analysis by Kick Big Polluters Out.
At least 2,456 fossil fuel representatives were present, up from 636 at last year’s summit, more than almost every country’s delegation.
Well for one, don’t forget this Anthropogenic Global Warming we have initiated, is going to trigger a whole bunch much more Global Warming as the permafrost continues melting, not to mention the probability of weird new diseases cropping up, etc… Point being the climate system’s transition into this new radically energized regime, isn’t going to be reaching a plateau for millennia, could be many, many millennia.
Think about the complex economic, communication, distribution networks required to keep most of those 8 billion fueled and fed today. Those systems are going to get battered beyond our imagining - that is written into the cards at this point. Exactly how it will play out, there’s no way of knowing, a lot will depend on Destructive Weather Roulette.
Location, location, location, timing, timing, timing, with the promise that next year there will be yet more heat/energy injected to our global heat and moisture distribution engine.
Enragingly tragic is that we know enough, to know, that where we are taking this global ride will be neither fun, nor conducive to healthy human living.
That “woman” is an esteemed scientist named Sabine Hossenfelder and she knows what the scientific obstacles are that may be encountered in terraforming the whole or part of a barren planet.
The Coevolution of Life and Environment on Mars: An Ecosystem Perspective on the Robotic Exploration of Biosignatures
What has yet to happen is to think of Mars in terms of a possible coevolution of life and environment, where data are synergistically pulled together in a dynamic vision of an ecosystem . The merit of such a perspective is to give consideration to what the characteristics of an early martian biosphere, if any, would have been like.
Performing this exercise to the best of our knowledge, as limited as it may be today, is not only important at this stage but necessary to the development of a more systemic, substantive, and informed guiding principle about where to search (potential exploration sites), what to search for (types of habitats and biosignatures), and how to explore (scales, resolution, instruments, and detection thresholds).
This proposition is supported by Robert Hazen
Theoretically it is possible that Mars’ mineral composition may support the evolution of biology, but IMO, time is a real player in this game and the question is how long would it take to “invent” biology.
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In 1960, i was seven, we were living in Paris and i went to school by myself, with a big avenue to cross. More, my 4 years old sister was entrusted to me.
Even not rich, we had a full time maid at home.
My father was unemployed 2 or three times, And it did not last. During these times, we ate more noodles and less meat.
My grand mother lived in a big house in the countryside and we went there during our summer vacations, playing with our cousins.
Even if not very religious, my parents took us to church every Sunday.
In France, as parents of four children, my parents received each month from the welfare state enough money to feed 7 persons.
School was free and it was a time of optimism.
The futurists were dissertating about the end of work and the affluent society.
Samuelson the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1970 was explaining that there will be no more economic crises as a thing of the past.
French service for employment were advertising themselves with a slogan : " You buy your bread in the neighborhood of your home, look for a job near your home."
Later as a student, i began to look for a summer job around the 15th of June.
And, in the mean time, the scientific services of the oil majors, of the US and British governments were predicting the climate change and choose to do nothing.
On the other side, the colonial war and imperialism, the setting of the destruction of our ecosystem, the exploitation of migrants coming from Spain, Portugal, and north Africa, a very conservative society.
The 30 glorious years ended in the 73/74.
Three factors:
- the oil shock
- the ideological and political victory of the financial capitalism
- the failure of the soviet system, which suppressed a concurrent of the capitalist system and took off the need of the Keynesian-Fordian compromise.
I think he is referring to the OP, not the post by CC.
I never said we could keep growing. I just don’t think we will suddenly go to complete extinction.
Never said the will to change matches the need to change. Change will be forced on us.
How can you say that when you’ve learned those things from others?
That’s kinda my point. I do think about infrastructure collapsing and lots of people dying. You still haven’t made a case for total extinction.
I forgot about that. They didn’t consider the greedy people who would figure out how to keep transferring wealth to the hands of a few. Those few got enough people to believe that we needed them, that they would build that world of free time and affluence.
This is the inflection point. Jimmy Carter’s years. The historian Heather Cox Richardson has such a great view of history, knowing the facts, and seeing how they influence the intangibles. He almost brought peace to the Middle East, brought more minorities and women into his administration than ever before, eschewed the racist South where he came from, put solar panels on the White House and so much more.
Then Reagan took the panels down. Both Carter and Reagan were populists, but Reagan appealed to racists, to bottom-line short-term thinking, to fighting communism by giving money to his friends in the military industry instead of showing the world what a free and open society is.
This is Heather’s daily post, free and open to the public:
December 29, 2024 (Sunday)
Former President Jimmy Carter died today, December 29, 2024, at age 100 after a life characterized by a dedication to human rights. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, died on November 19, 2023; she was 96 years old.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, in southwestern Georgia, about half an hour from the site of the infamous Andersonville Prison, where nearly 13,000 United States soldiers died of disease and hunger during the Civil War only sixty years earlier. He was the first U.S. president to be born in a hospital.
Carter’s South was impoverished. He grew up on a dirt road about three miles from Plains, in the tiny, majority-Black village of Archery, where his father owned a farm and the family grew corn, cotton, peanuts, and sugar cane. The young Carters and the children of the village’s Black sharecroppers grew up together as the Depression that crashed down in 1929 drained away what little prosperity there was in Archery.
After undergraduate coursework at Georgia Southwestern College and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carter completed his undergraduate degree at the U.S. Naval Academy. In the Navy he rose to the rank of lieutenant, serving on submarines—including early nuclear submarines—in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.
In 1946, Carter married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s, who grew up in Plains. When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and took his family back to the Carters’ Georgia farm, where he and Rosalynn operated both the farm and a seed and supply company.
Arriving back in Georgia just a year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Carter quickly became involved in local politics. In 1962 he challenged a fraudulent election for a Georgia state senate seat, and in the runoff, voters elected him. The Carters became supporters of Democratic president John F. Kennedy in a state whose dominant Democratic Party was in turmoil as white supremacists clashed with Georgians eager to leave their past behind. Kennedy had sent troops to desegregate the University of Mississippi.
Carter ran for governor in 1966, the year after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. He lost the primary, coming in third behind another liberal Democrat and a staunch segregationist Democrat, Lester Maddox, who won it and went on to win the governorship. When Carter ran again in 1970, he emphasized his populism rather than Black rights, appealing to racist whites. He won the Democratic primary with 60% of the vote and, in a state that was still Democrat-dominated, easily won the governorship.
But when Carter took office in 1971, he abandoned his concessions to white racists and took a stand for new race relations in the United States. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he told Georgians in his inaugural speech. “No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”
His predecessor, Maddox, had refused to let state workers take the day off to attend services for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral; Carter pointedly hung a portrait of King—as well as portraits of educator Lucy Craft Laney and Georgia politician and minister Henry McNeal Turner—in the State Capitol.
Carter brought to office a focus not only on civil rights but also on cleaning up and streamlining the state’s government. He consolidated more than 200 government offices into 20 and backed austerity measures to save money while also supporting new social programs, including equalizing aid to poor and wealthy schools, prison reform and early childhood development programs, and community centers for mentally disabled children.
At the time, the state constitution prohibited Carter from reelection, so he built recognition in the national Democratic Party and turned his sights on the presidency. In the wake of the scandals that brought down both President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, as well as many of their staff, when it seemed to many Americans that all of Washington was corrupt, voters welcomed the newcomer Carter as an outsider who would work for the people.
He seemed a new kind of Democrat, one who could usher in a new, multicultural democracy now that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had brought Black and Brown voters into the American polity. Like many of the other civil rights coalitions in the twentieth century, Carter’s supporters shared music reinforced their politics, and Carter’s deep knowledge of blues, R&B, folk, and especially the gospel music of his youth helped him appeal to that era’s crucially important youth vote. Bob Dylan; Crosby, Stills & Nash, Nile Rodgers, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, as well as the Allman Brothers, all backed Carter, who later said: “I was practically a non-entity, but everyone knew the Allman Brothers. When they endorsed me, all the young people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers like him, we can vote for him.’”
Elected by just over 50% of American voters over Republican candidate Gerald R. Ford’s count of about 48%, Carter’s outsider status and determination to govern based on the will of the people sparked opposition from within Washington—including in the Democratic Party—and stories that he was buffeted about by the breezes of polls. But Carter’s domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat once said that Carter believed an elected president should “park politics at the Oval Office door” and try to win election by doing the right thing. He took pride in ignoring political interests—a stance that would hurt his ability to get things done in Washington, D.C.
Carter began by trying to make the government more representative of the American people: Eizenstat recalled that Carter appointed more women, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans to official positions and judgeships “than all 38 of his predecessors combined.”
Carter instituted ethics reforms to reclaim the honor of the presidency after Nixon’s behavior had tarnished it. He put independent inspectors in every department and established that corporations could not bribe foreign officials to get contracts. He expanded education programs, establishing the Department of Education, and tried to relieve the country from reliance on foreign oil by establishing the Department of Energy.
Concerned that the new regulatory agencies that Congress had created since the mid-1960s might be captured by industries and that they were causing prices to rise, Carter began the deregulation movement to increase competition. He began with the airlines and moved to the trucking industry, railroad lines, and long-distance phone service. He also deregulated beer production—his legalization of homebrewing sparked today’s craft brewing industry.
But Carter inherited slow economic growth and the inflation that had plagued presidents since Nixon, and the 1979 drop in oil production after the Iranian revolution exacerbated both. While more than ten million jobs were added to the U.S. economy during his term—almost twice the number Reagan added in his first term, and more than five times the number George H.W. Bush added in his—inflation hit 14% in 1980. To combat that inflation, Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve, knowing he would combat inflation with high interest rates, a policy that brought down inflation during the first term of his successor, Ronald Reagan.
Carter also focused on protecting the environment. He was the first president to undertake the federal cleanup of a hazardous waste site, declaring a federal emergency in the New York neighborhood of Love Canal and using federal disaster money to remediate the chemicals that had been stored underground there.
Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as a national monument, saying: “These areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic and cultural value, and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world,” he said. In 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Coming after Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and support for Chile’s right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose government had systematically tortured and executed his political opponents, Carter’s foreign policy emphasized human rights. Carter echoed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights established by the United Nations, promising he would promote “human freedom” while protecting “the individual from the arbitrary power of the state.” He was best known for the Camp David Accords that achieved peace between Israel and Egypt after they had fought a series of wars. Those accords, negotiated with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel paved the way for others. Carter credited the religious faith of the three men for making the agreement possible.
Carter also built on his predecessor Nixon’s outreach to China, normalizing relations and affording diplomatic recognition of China, enabling the two countries to develop a bilateral relationship. While commenters often credit President Reagan with pressuring the Soviet Union enough to bring about its dissolution, in fact it was Carter who negotiated the nuclear arms treaty that Reagan honored and who, along with his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as a major breach in international relations. He cut off grain sales to the USSR, ordered a massive defense buildup, and persuaded European leaders to accept nuclear missiles stationed in their countries, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said was a significant factor in the dissolution of the USSR.
To Carter also fell the Iran hostage crisis in which Muslim fundamentalists overran the American embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran, seizing 66 Americans and holding them hostage for 444 days, in return for a promise that the American-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whom Carter had admitted to the U.S. for cancer treatment, be returned to Iran for trial. Carter immediately froze Iranian assets and began secret negotiations, while Americans watched on TV as Iranian mobs chanted “Death to America.” A secret mission to rescue the hostages failed when one of the eight helicopters dispatched to rescue the hostages crashed, killing eight soldiers. Before he left office, Carter successfully negotiated for the hostages’ return; they were released the day of Reagan’s inauguration.
Carter left office in January 1981, and the following year, in partnership with Emory University, he and Rosalynn established the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization to advance peace, health, and human rights around the world.
The Carter Center has supervised elections in more than 100 countries, has helped farmers in 15 African countries to double or triple grain production, and has worked to prevent disease in Latin America and Africa. In 1986, when the Carter Center began a program to eradicate infections of the meter-long Guinea worm that emerges painfully from sufferers’ skin and incapacitates them for long periods, 3.5 million people a year in Africa and Asia were infected; in 2022 there were only 13 known infections, in 2023 there were 14. So far in 2024, there have been 7, but those will not be officially confirmed until spring 2025. In a 2015 interview, Carter said he hoped to outlive the last case.
President Carter said, “When I was in the White House, I thought of human rights primarily in terms of political rights, such as rights to free speech and freedom from torture or unjust imprisonment. As I traveled around the world since I was president, I learned there was no way to separate the crucial rights to live in peace, to have adequate food and health care, and to have a voice in choosing one’s political leaders. These human needs and rights are inextricably linked.”
In 2002, Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” When journalist Katie Couric of The Today Show asked him if the Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me, I think that’s the most exciting thing.”
In his Farewell Address on January 14, 1981, President Jimmy Carter worried about the direction of the country. He noted that the American people had begun to lose faith in the government’s ability to deal with problems and were turning to “single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens, our own personal views and our own private interests are protected.” This focus on individualism, he warned, distorts the nation’s purpose because “the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.”
Carter urged Americans to protect our “most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” and to advance the basic human rights that had, after all, “invented America.” “Our common vision of a free and just society,” he said, “is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.”
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