Maybe, but then too, I've heard the same thing said about and during every time period since I've been old enough to pay attention to such things.
My father said he didn't believe America would survive the great depression.
My mother said she thought the same thing during ww2.
Many doubted we would survive the tumultuous late 60s-70s.
The resilience tho, of the great experiment called American style democracy has never been in doubt. We've been thru much much worse than the contemporary time.
I agree that there have been some really tuff time's and events that has happened in the world. The great depression like your father talked about. War's that have taken place and so on.
Most of thoes tragedies were what I am going to call isolated events. The great depression happened here in the United States. I might be wrong but i don't think it directly effected other countries across the globe.
Alot of the war's that have been fought also didn't effect every country on earth. I might also be wrong when i say even the world wars that were fought didn't directly effect alot of countries across the globe.
The only event that I can think of that happened and is comparable to what is going to happen within less than 50 year's from now across the globe. World wide was when the meteor that hit earth billions of years ago that caused a cloud of dust big enough to block out the sun for don't hold me to this being right. Hundreds of year's maybe ? ( Point is a long time. ) Long enough to kill out most if not all plant life on earth. Along with animals like the dinosaur's and other living things that relyed on plant life to live.
Now every type of life on earth is pretty resilient in order to continue on after something like that happening. Every life form on earth today is testament to that being a fact.
I am going to compare the world to a cattle farm operation. And the people living on it as cattle.
Earth is big enough to feed at the very most 10 billion people. Sort of like each cattle farm can only support so many head of cattle. I think most farmers will agree you can only run as many cattle on your farm a nd it's resources and room will allow you to.
Actually scientist say that the earth's number of people the earth and its resources it can sustain is 9 billion people. But even at that number people will be fighting over thoes resources. People will be killing other people for thoes resources just to stay alive.
The world's population is right at 8 billion people right now. Actually it is 7.9 billion right now. Close enough i am going to call it 8 billion.
So all these tuff time's you mentioned, great depression, world war II, other things we as a country have experienced since the U.S. became a nation is really trivial things compared to what even a 30 year old person is going to deal with in the near future. A new born baby born 50 years from now is going to be born in a pretty crappy World.
We will all be thinking alike then. You won't have to worry about dead beats wanting a free ride then.