Things that have always been issues

Here are some things that have always been issues, except for when they haven't been an issue at all. I'd first like to show the google timeline that I'm using is a generally good representation of what's important at a given time.

The search I did was for 'War' You can pick out the major wars on this ol' graph. Bigger bars mean more was written about it at the time. A bar twice as big is twice as written about. The bars don't scale to the same height, so what might be a blip on one graph, if plotted on another graph would be massive.

Interestingly, we're less interested in war these days than we were back in WW1 and WW2. Then again, in the WWs, the whole country was effectively mobilized to fight it.

Here's something that was a major point of contention in the 2000 election, but no one talks about anymore.

Here's something from the 2000 election that has periodically cropped up, but is mostly ignored between long stretches of the US nationally fixating on it.

I cropped all these timelines so they covered 1900 to today, but it's interesting to know that the last one was also a major issue periodically in the 1800s. Somehow, the nation avoided collapse then.


Here's something that was major in the 2008 election, that we were told was a brand spanking new issue that we must tackle now. Does the 80s count as new?

And here are two issues that I've been told have always been important, and people have always cared deeply about it, and they must be addressed now. 

And here's Hanging Chad. The most important thing of its time, and something we really don't care about now.

And here's a pet rock.

Not a very scientific analysis, but I guess what I'm saying is that there sure is a lot of what looks like fads in politics. Most of which never reach any form of resolution. And yet the world doesn't come quite to an end, like the politicians predicted if we didn't do what they wanted to do, right that moment..