The 1970s gave us great music, epic movies, and classic television shows.
If you're a sports fan in this area, the '70s was also a pretty heady decade. The University of Kentucky's basketball team toppled an unbeaten Indiana team in the NCAA tournament in 1975 before losing in the national championship game to UCLA in John Wooden's farewell, then won the NIT the following year when it still meant something with the nucleus of the team that went on to win the NCAA title in 1978. UK's football team broke out of mediocrity to enjoy a moment of relevance on the national stage in 1977. And the Cincinnati Reds were Major League Baseball's dominant team in the decade, with National League championships in 1970 and 1972 and World Series titles in 1975 and 1976 with a team full of stars that was affectionately known in the Ohio Valley as the Big Red Machine.
But pretty much everything else about the 1970s was forgettable. It was a dark time in our nation's history. Inflation ran rampant as prices on just about everything shot sky-high. Political unrest in the nation was palpable. There were shortages of vital products in the marketplace.
Now it appears that we're in a rerun of the '70s a half-century later but without the good entertainment options to distract us. All we need, pretty much, is a hostage crisis abroad and three really bad winters in a row, and it's the Jimmy Carter presidency all over again without Kyle Macy rubbing his hands on his calf-high socks before shooting free throws.
Far too many people who vote or make policy today weren't even born in the 1970s, or have no significant memory of how truly bad things were. Presidents Nixon and Ford had their issues, but the bulk of the debacle came during Carter's term.
The inflation we're seeing now, as prices rise on consumer goods, is often compared to the '70s. There was even a term coined for the phenomenon back then: "stagflation," meaning a huge round of inflation without beneficial economic growth. Sound familiar? That's what we're experiencing now, as families struggle to meet the burdens of rising costs for food, gasoline, and other necessities.
America experienced two separate energy crises, once in Nixon's term and again in Carter's term. Gasoline shortages were common, and long lines at the pumps were an everyday sight as prices rose. The problem wasn't limited to gasoline, though. There was a shortage of natural gas, as well, and for a period of time, businesses in Lexington closed their doors at 6 p.m. nightly.
A weak and ineffective president, Carter didn't actively seek solutions to the problems plaguing the country. Instead of trying to find a way out of the situation and leading a recovery, he spoke of a "crisis of confidence" that was termed by the press -- largely sympathetic to him and his ideology -- as "a national malaise." He told Americans to turn their thermostats down and wear sweaters at home during three straight brutal winters that caused the Ohio River to freeze over for days, such that people could walk between Cincinnati and Covington. Governors of his own party told him, basically, that he appeared to be neutered and incapable.
The Iranian militants certainly took advantage of his ineptitude when they took several Americans hostage at the embassy in Tehran. If his failures to handle the energy and inflation issues had put him at a disadvantage when he ran for re-election in 1980, the hostage crisis and the optimism exuded by Ronald Reagan sealed Carter's fate.
Conservatives have long debated which president was worse, Carter or Barack Obama. Both were terrible, but there were key differences. Carter was a lost ball in high weeds, well-meaning but incapable. Obama was malevolent, cunning and calculating and knowing exactly what he was doing to the country.
Carter is widely depicted as a good man, a man of faith; although that description is hard to reconcile given his pro-abortion stance and his anti-Israel views. The similarities in events between the current ones of Joe Biden's presidency and what happened in Carter's term may make it more suitable to compare Carter to Biden instead of Obama.
"Lunch Bucket Joe" tries to pass himself off as a regular guy, a man of the people, a good and decent fellow. Yet we're a year into his presidency and he's bumbling and stumbling. Gas prices are rising even as domestic production and continental pipelines are scaled back. Store shelves are empty to the point where trends on Twitter, a forum generally sympathetic to Biden, point it out.
The parallels to the 1970s are uncanny. Biden hasn't yet faced a serious international challenge along the lines of the Iranian hostage crisis , but it's coming. For all the talk about how Donald Trump was Vladimir Putin's puppet, Russia stayed pretty much in check during Trump's term. Now, the Russians are threatening Ukraine and Biden seems determined to get America into a mess that's really none of our business. North Korea and Kim Jong Un blinked when Trump stood up to them, but they're likely to feel emboldened after watching Biden's bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, which may come home to roost as Islamic terrorists again flex their muscles.
If the 2020s are a repeat of the 1970s, and Biden truly is the second coming of Carter, then how do we escape it? Do we get new classic rock bands like Aerosmith and Van Halen? Another "Star Wars" trilogy? Or are we doomed to endure a repeat of the absolute worst decade of my lifetime without any redeeming properties?
As inflation continues to burden the American public, as our way of life becomes harder to sustain, as it becomes more difficult to find essential products on store shelves, we can only hope that someone emerges to stop the decline and restore America the way Reagan cleaned up after Carter. Whether that's another term for Trump, the election of a new leader cut in the mold of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or some as-yet unknown leader, it's obvious that we're in another crisis of confidence and heading toward a dark, cold season of national malaise unless something changes. Otherwise, it's a rerun of That '70s Show. Let's just pray the river doesn't freeze over again and we don't have snow cover on the ground from Christmas until March.
