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Sunday November 30, 03
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04:50 AM - Ch. 2 - Winter in America
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Chapter 2 - Winter in America
If we were to just look at the Winter eras of the Anglo-American era, we would have the following:
* The War of the Roses, 1459-1487
* The Armada Crisis, 1569-1594
* The Glorious Revolution, 1675-1704
* The American Revolution, 1773-1794
* The Civil War, 1860-1865
* The Great Depression & WWII , 1929-1945
* The Millennial Crisis, 2001-2024
The American era begins with the Glorious Revolution. Each era carries catalysts that start the Winter season, a spark that ignites the fury and a climax to mark the ending. The following is a list of the American Winters and their catalysts, sparks, and climaxes.
Glorious Revolution, 1675-1704 [i]
* 1673, The Surrender of New York, catalyst
* 1675, King Phillips War, catalyst
* 1676, Bacon's Rebellion, catalyst
* 1687, Chart Oak Incident, spark
* 1689, The Glorious Revolution, climax [ii]
American Revolution, 1773-1794 [iii]
* 1765, Stamp Act, catalyst
* 1767, Townshend Duties, catalyst
* 1773, Boston Tea Party, catalyst
* 1774, Coercive Act, catalyst
* 1775, British Raid on Concord and Lexington, spark
* 1781, Yorktown, climax [iv]
Civil War, 1857-1865[v]
* 1857, Publishing of Hinter Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South, catalyst
* 1857, Dred Scott Decision, catalyst
* 1859, John Brown raid and execution, catalyst
* 1860, Lincoln elected, spark
* 1863, Gettysburg, climax [vi]
Depression and WWII, 1929-1945 [vii]
* 1929, Black Tuesday Stock Crash, catalyst
* 1941, Pearl Harbor, spark
* 1944, D-Day, climax [viii]
What's truly scary about the Winter era is the alignment and the age locations of the generations alive during the Winter era.
Reference:
i Strauss and Howe, The Fourth Turning 128.
ii Ibid 45. (all five bullet points)
iii Ibid 45.
iv Ibid 45. (all six bullet points)
v Ibid 45-46.
vi Ibid 45-46. (all five bullet points)
vii Ibid 46.
viii Ibid 45. (all three bullet points)
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Discussion
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Saturday November 29, 03
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02:02 PM - Ch. 1 - Seasons
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The following is from the book, Winter is Coming, by jim goulding
Chapter 1 – Seasons
Winter is coming. Society experiences a catalyst that shocks everyone out of an individualized stupor. Suddenly focus is shifted on a national level. This focus shifts attention from internal, national problems to outer, world problems. World problems that were once ignored by the people in this country come to the forefront. It’s as if a collective mind turns its attention to what is going on outside this country.
Many things happen after the catalyst. People feel as if society itself is cracking at the seams. Our government can’t solve the simplest problem. Nor can the individual seem to solve the simplest problem.
The vision of the future turns dark. There’s a sector of society can see this and can see what is happening. They start to talk of the doom that is ahead and try to warn others.
This sector of society is clever when it comes to societal problems. They understand, better than the other generations, that there is a terrible event coming. They see reality for what it is. Furthermore, there’s some older members of society that also sense the problem. They are the people who are now over 62 years of age [2003].
They know they’ve seen something or felt something like this before, but just can’t quite place it. If they do know what it is they are sensing, they really don’t want to talk about it. They know it’s futile. They know because they lived through it once before. They are the only generation that experiences a crisis in their youth; then, again when they are reaching and fully occupying old age.
These people were born from 1925-1942. They are the Silent generation and they have a lot to offer us during this time, as does the dying G.I. generation, born 1901-1924.
What about those people who see reality like no others? That generation was born from 1961-1981, and they are Generation-X (Gen-X). Divisional boundary issues on what year Gen-X started being born and what year Boomers stopped being born do not concern me. I know where they started and ended. Seven years of generational study have provided the answer. This is an issue I do not wish to debate or discuss in this book. Let’s save generational boundaries for another time and get back to Winter.
To put Winter into context, let’s start with Spring. We need to go back to V-J day, in 1945. That was the start of Spring and it lasted until JFK‘s assassination in 1963. This specific era, 1945-1963, is given a name to aid in identifying this particular Spring.
It’s called the American High. Labeling this era with a name is important because there have been many Spring eras in American history. The first Spring was called the Tudor Renaissance and it lasted from 1487 to 1517. There were five more Spring eras after that leading up to the last Spring, the American High.
We all know the cycle of the seasons. Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. This analogy helps identify what Strauss and Howe (S&H) call Turnings.
Below is a list of the definitions S&H created. They are listed as Season, Turning and Turning name, respectively.
§ Spring, 1st Turning, High
§ Summer, 2nd Turning, Awakening
§ Fall, 3rd Turning, Unraveling
§ Winter, 4th Turning, Crisis
Moving back to the most current Turnings in American history, we need to identify the era that came after the American High (1945-1963). The next season is Summer and it is an Awakening era. The years from 1964-1984 are called the Conscious Revolution. [1]
The years from 1985-2001 are called the Culture Wars. The years from 2001-2024 [2] are called the Millennial Crisis.
As I’ve stated in the footnotes, the Fall season ended 9/11/2001. The events of 9/11 are what S&H would define as a catalyst. A catalyst can define the boundaries between seasons. Therefore, I believe that Winter has begun. This is my theory and not S&H’s. However, we have not yet seen the defining event that is called the spark.
When the spark comes, everyone will know that we are in the Winter era. As a nation, we have experienced many sparks.
The Chart Oak Incident, in 1687, ushered in the Glorious Revolution.
The British Raid on Concord and Lexington in 1775 led to the American Revolution.
Lincoln’s election and The Fort Sumter attack brought the Civil War.
Finally, the last spark in American history was the attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941. All these sparks happened in Winter eras and all of them came after either one catalyst or a series of catalysts.
I am from Generation-X. I would like to welcome you to Winter. This is the time that my generational archetype (Nomad-Reactive) thrives. We are at our best during the crisis. How the heck would I know? Because, it’s all
happened before.
References
[1] In the book The Fourth Turning, S&H end the Fall era between 2003 and 2005. I have concluded that the 3rd Turning ended with the events of 9/11.
[2] There is no definitive date to end the Millennial Crisis. This is merely a forecast I’ve drawn from all of the cycle historians I’ve read.
Copyright:
All rights reserved.
Copyright© 2003, James A. Goulding, Elmhurst, Illinois.
This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, James A. Goulding.
Printed electronically in the U.S.A. by Jim Goulding
Cover Design by James A. Goulding
Editing by Jordan Watkins
Disclaimer:
This book is not an investment book. It’s for informational purposes only. Always, always, always, seek the advice of a professionally certified investment adviser. I may be a trader, but that does not qualify me to give investment advice nor do I want to give you that impression.
_________________
www.jamesgoulding.com
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Discussion
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01:44 PM - Winter is Coming Intro (a book about the coming crisis)
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The following is from the book, Winter is Coming, by jim goulding
Introduction
Winter is coming tells the story of a crisis era. This crisis is just a few short years away. A great deal of the theory in this book is based on two generational theorists, William Strauss and Neil Howe, (S&H)[1] . Neil Howe is a graduate of Yale with degrees in history and economics. William Straus is a graduate of Harvard, with degrees in law, economics, and public policy.
There are a few other cycle theorists mentioned; however, S&H’s work makes up the heart of this book.
There are also theories of my own. Some are economic, and some are behavioral.
S&H have complied a huge body of work on generational theory. Their work is extremely well researched and detailed. In their first book, Generations; The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (Generations), they were the first generational theorists to write about and group every living generation in American history. What they discovered were cycles in our country’s history that explain many of our past events, both good and bad. However, it’s what they were able to tell us about the future that makes Generations so fascinating.
Generations was written in 1991 and many of the events foretold have come true, with startling accuracy.
In S&H’s 1997 book, The Fourth Turning, they explore, in great detail, the coming crisis era they call Winter. Many of the predictions in The Fourth Turning have already come true.
In writing Winter is coming, I wanted to spread the word about their predictions. Furthermore, I wanted to present the information in a short, concise, less detailed, and abbreviated manner. However, in the later chapters, I’ve written about some issues that I think can’t be overlooked. Those issues are behavioral. More precisely, I take several generations and archetypes to task.
My hope is that you, the reader, will use this book as a stepping-stone to The Fourth Turning.
Numerous books have been written about coming apocalyptic events: Why should this one be any different? To explain this I need to present a little background on how I came to find S&H.
The Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) has been my career-home since I was seventeen years old. Today, I’m forty-one years old. In the years in between, I’ve studied many
theorists who predict the future for a living. That’s because the CBOT is a futures-trading exchange. If you work there and trade for a living, you always want to know what is going to happen in the future. If you can figure the future out, you can figure the market out. Needless to say, millions of people have been trying to do this for hundreds of years. I am but one of them.
As I said earlier, I am always studying methods of trying to predict the future. This is exactly how I came across S&H. I’d been studying human behavior and economic cycles. Harry S. Dent (HS Dent) is a phenomenal economic theorist. He’s the only person I’d read, back in the 1990s, that accurately forecasted DOW 10,000 (this in his 1991 book, The Great Boom Ahead).
He went on to write The Roaring 2000s. In that book he predicts DOW 35,000 by 2009.
Furthermore, in the book The Roaring 2000s, Dent wrote about S&H and their generational theory. (Some of HS Dent’s work is included in this book.) It fascinated me, so I ran out and bought Generations and The Fourth Turning. What truly astounded me was that many of their predictions about society had come true since they’d written the books. This sent me to the book stores to read other books on the same topic.
The problem was, the other books didn’t do so well at predicting the future. In fact, they were really off. It seemed that many of the books didn’t take generational shifts into account. They were predicting that a generation of people would either act the same in different age locations or they’d behave the same as the previous generation did throughout their collective life.
The Late Great Planet Earth [2] is a typical example. Wow! Is it possible to be that wrong and sell a few million books? Apparently, yes.
What’s interesting about generational theory is that it can explain why The Late Great Planet Earth sold so many copies in its first few years. It was released in May 1970.
The timing couldn’t have been more perfect (albeit lousy predictions). It was specifically directed at a generation of Prophet-Idealists, the Boomers (b.1943-1960), and a generation looking for some comfort in Catholicism after the church let them down in the early 1960s, the Silent generation (b.1925-1942).
I don’t mean to pick on that particular book, but come on. The predictions weren’t even close! If they had been, we’d all have met Christ by now. However, I admire Hal Lindsey (and C.C. Carlson) for writing it. Trying to predict the future takes guts, so, hats off.
S&H’s theories are not only correct, they’re scary. If they continue their streak, we are headed for a major catastrophe.
Lastly, it doesn’t matter what line of business you are in or what walk of life you come from, this book is for all of you because the crisis will affect all of you.
Take care,
jim goulding
www.jamesgoulding.com
References
[1] For the remainder of the book, I will write the authors’ names as Strauss and Howe in the first reference in each chapter. Thereafter, I’ll refer to them as S&H.
[2] Lindsey, Hal, and C.C. Carlson.
* * *
Books by William Strauss and Neil Howe, used for research in this book.
Generations; The History to America’s Future, 1584-2069. Published by William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue of the America’s, New York, NY 10019.
The Fourth Turning; An American Prophecy. Published by Broadway Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.
13th Gen; Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, by Strauss and Howe. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
I also used the book The Roaring 2000s, by Harry S. Dent, JR. Published by Simon & Schuster through their division, Touchstone, Rockefeller Center, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
Copyright:
All rights reserved.
Copyright© 2003, James A. Goulding, Elmhurst, Illinois.
This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, James A. Goulding.
Printed electronically in the U.S.A. by Jim Goulding
Cover Design by James A. Goulding
Editing by Jordan Watkins
Disclaimer:
This book is not an investment book. It’s for informational purposes only. Always, always, always, seek the advice of a professionally certified investment adviser. I may be a trader, but that does not qualify me to give investment advice nor do I want to give you that impression.
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