But since then there has been a sea change in attitudes. Marriage equality, abortion on demand, an openly gay man as premier. Little backlash against migrants even when the economy tanked in 07-08. But this did not cause much in the way of estrangement. Indeed I have seen the older generations change too, not just put up with things.
I can only speculate as to why. I think partly because people started to travel and see how things were better in other more enlightened countries and imported those values to Ireland. Life was also improving for most people as an amazing rate which leaves little reason to look for people to blame for things. The church destroyed it's own standing by being totally uncompromising in its attitude to change and covering up abuse.
I believe Ireland also looked on in horror at American politics descending into a complete shit-show with scant respect for the principles it once stood for. You must understand that up till the 90s most Irish thought the USA was the pinnacle of western society. We still hold great affection for the people in general and artistic culture and landscape but the toxic politics, uncompromising religious attitudes and so on are something we view as having held us back in the past and once we abandoned that or at least compromised we made progress.
Anyway, this is just a bit of a brain dump of one point of view. Take it as it is ;)
I have to wonder how much the violence of the last few decades impacted ireland and the nations ability to just accept "the other".
The Irish struggled a bit more with immigration from more different cultures and racism is a challenge everywhere but compared to many other European countries Ireland is on a better path I would say.
I'm rambling a little, but to your question about how the troubles shaped Irish attitudes it's worth noting as a result of the Belfast (good Friday) Agreement our constitution does acknowledge every citizens right to define their own identity.
Also, here's an interesting story about how Irish view the "other" today
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/14/pitching-up-anc...
Invention of the Pill (and similar biotech medical advances) changed everything forever in ways we still don’t understand. And the consequences/reasons don’t cleanly break along Culture War fault lines. (The Culture War was, in many ways, created by The Pill, too.)
But I also think its more than simply the abandonment of religion. It is the abandonment of religion combined with the rise of the internet/social media. It isn't only religion that has suffered participation declines in the previous decades. Local communities of all kinds have crumbled. The internet has provided people with a means of escape from anyone that could possibly disagree with you and allows you to find perfectly insular cultural bubbles. This is immediately more gratifying than real world relationships, but it also conditions people to have zero tolerance for anyone in "meat space" that isn't in complete alignment with them, in which case they simply distance themselves from the relationship. But at the same time, many of these online community relationships tend to be more shallow and superficial than real life ones, which is why so many people report strong feelings of loneliness in their lives.
We've essentially dismantled most of our traditional local sources of community and replaced them with superficial but unsatisfying online ones.
Honestly, there's probably a deeper cultural change that's driving both: ever increasing individualism and increasing unwillingness to sacrifice the expression of that individualism for anything.
This from the OP was pretty poignant and struck me as very true:
> ...This freedom enables us to become untethered and protected from hurtful or abusive family members.
> Yet in less grave scenarios our American love affair with the needs and rights of the individual conceals how much sorrow we create for those we leave behind. We may see cutting off family members as courageous rather than avoidant or selfish. We can convince ourselves that it’s better to go it alone than to do the work it takes to resolve conflict. Some problems may be irresolvable, but there are also relationships that don’t need to be lost forever.
2020 with the US election and the spectrum of response to COVID has thrown this into stark relief. As someone in their late 40s, I have been shocked by the selfishness of my fellow citizens.
What we saw building in the last decade or so, and come to a head in 2020 is out-of-control narcissism: Selfishness, entitlement, lack of empathy, this belief that life is a movie and you are the main character. This is the kind of thing that not only estranges one from family, friends, and society, but prevents any sort of collective action for societal good.
Not that she has any real room to protest here, she deliberately estranged herself in the very complete sense from her parents and sisters, I've never met a single person on that side of the family despite them living an hour away.
In kind of a macro sense I appreciate my parents raising me, but I do not consider continued contact with them obligatory in any way, shape, or form, and certainly not at the level that my parents in particular want that relationship.
This is what I can't understand. I get not wanting a relationship if your parents were abusive. But if you 'appreciate your parents raising [you]', then clearly you think your childhood was 'good enough', so don't you think you owe them something? Anything? MY childhood was hardly perfect. My mother and father are both incredibly flawed individuals who still get on my nerves, to the point of tears many times. But... they're my parents. I mean, I've made them cry before, and I know I have all kinds of negative personality traits. I can't imagine them just leaving me like that. Sounds terrible
IMHO, no. You don't owe your parents anything for doing the job they signed up for. I have a great relationship with my parents and had a great upbringing. It's very difficult for me to imagine cutting off contact. However, I also don't feel like I owe them a single thing and I think they'd agree with me on that.
For example, if my parents someday needed a place to stay (maybe they can't take care of themselves). I'd feel responsible for them. I definitely feel like I'd owe them that and would feel responsible for their well being.
Though, that wouldn't be unconditional. I can certainly envision a bunch of situations that would change that.
I guess what I'm saying is it's complicated to me.
I'm lucky enough to have a decent upbringing and get along with my parents as well, and this comment isn't intended to be combative, but the "You don't owe your parents anything for doing the job they signed up for" is not strictly true in a legal sense. This is a reflection of American family values enshrined in law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws
However, I also know a lot of people raised like I was who have left as well, and see no problem with it. They had perfectly fine childhoods, but treat their parents like trash.
Sometimes you are 47 years old when you learn about stufd like alcoholism, gambling, violence in own extended seemingly model familly. Pretty heavy stuff and still managed to be quite hidden. Less heavy stuff is even easier to keept away from others.
Plus people who distance or leave parents as adults often react to how relationship looks now and what it does to them. And sometimes it is done to protect your own kids or so that you are not forced to entangle yourself into new dramas.
For me personally, what drove me away from my childhood religion was simple research into it's history. Why should I care if my leaders claim homosexuality is a sin when they've done far worse in the past also claiming to come from god?
Yet for my parents, going against the leader's edicts is unthinkable.
All that comes back to my thoughts on estrangement and religion. While that's not a route my parents have taken, it happens a lot from the online stories I've read.
I guess this is a long winded way to say I'm still trying to figure out how much culture causes religion and religion causes culture. How many of these wild generational differences are due to just general cultural shifts from things like media, and how many of these changes came from things like leaving a faith behind? Did A cause B or B cause A or is it too complicated to be answered in a HN comment section.
When Stalin came to power, homosexuality became a topic unfit for public depiction, defense or discussion. Homosexual or bisexual Soviets who wanted a position within the Communist Party were expected to marry a person of the opposite sex, regardless of their actual sexual orientation
The Khrushchev government believed that absent of a criminal law against homosexuality, the sex between men that occurred in the prison environment would spread into the general population
The first Khrushchev-era sex education manual...described homosexuals as child molesters: "...homosexuals are aroused by and satisfy themselves with adolescents and youngsters, even though the latter have a normal interest towards girls
....
Thousands of people were imprisoned for homosexuality and government censorship of homosexuality and gay rights did not begin to slowly relax until the early 1970s
....
In 1984, a group of Russian gay men met and attempted to organize an official gay rights organization, only to be quickly shut down by the KGB
....
On 27 May 1993, homosexual acts between consenting males were legalised
> 40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
The 1944 Edict... sought to preserve the family unit by making divorces even more difficult to obtain
You'll have to provide some evidence that your list is anything to do with McCarthyist Commumism fears
If you can explain to me how government controlled production has ANY relationship to culture or the acceptance/rejection of homosexuality, I'm all ears. Bare in mind, communist governments have routinely banned homosexuality. [2]
To the likes of Skousen, everything that isn't accepting mormonism as the one true religion is a communist plot.
It is the same warzone though. But the people fighting it from the right look increasingly like the one Japanese guy who refused to acknowledge the surrender until the 1960s.
Edit to your edit: They are looking fringe because the other side won ;)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society
They're the seed of QAnon.
You then cite Skousen's talking points as if those were the "communists" actual goals and not his fever dreams.
The JBS lost, "communists" or "progressive orthodoxies" (conflating the two shows your priors) didnt win.
Go to nearly any church and you'll see the primary demographic is older individuals. In my younger days, it was quite a bit more even.
Millennials and Gen Z have dumped religion and with it a lot of the social norms. For example, homosexuality. Most Millennials and Gen Z have no problem with someone being gay. It's socially acceptable. Yet just a couple of decades ago one of the hardest hitting insults you could throw at someone was suggesting they weren't straight.
I wish more authors/researchers would explore this.