Astonishing political social changes in your lifetime.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I remember the days when a long-distance call was a Big Deal. My Dad travelled a lot on business, and he’d tell us ahead of time when he was going to call home. We’d be gathered around the phone at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday (for example), and when the phone rang, it would be Dad. Of course, we couldn’t talk long, because it was expensive. But it was great to hear Dad calling all the way from Vancouver, or Montreal, or Halifax.

Now, even though I’m 2000 miles away from Dad, I can call him any time; and under my phone plan, there’s no charge. Same for selected friends, no matter where they are in the US and Canada. A long-distance call is no longer a Big Deal.

42

Cable tv and the ability to rent videos (and VCR’s), when they first became available, were huge. They have been overshadowed now by the internet, but at the time there was talk that movie theatres would probably shut down because people could watch movies in their own homes!

43

I was reading through old stories in my town’s newspaper, and they successfully (but temporarily) shut down the adult store in the early 90s. The mayor’s rationale was that someone might go there…and then go to a playground! :eek: (The next step was unspeakable, I guess. But it was surely bad.)

44

The almost total dismantling of the industrial capacity in the nation and along with it the erosion of the middle class.

45

Communication has changed beyond recognition - If you wanted to be a Radio Ham the process of gaining your licence was tortuous and the equipment was expensive to obtain - so much that many people literally made their own. If you wanted to talk to someone around the world you sent them QSL cards as a memento. It seems that governments didn’t want ordinary folk talking to each other around the world - now, electronics are unbelievably cheap, use of Morse is pretty much dead, in fact the use of text is pretty much old hat, and even plain speech is getting old - now its video links and Facebook - we are very much more a world community. The effects can be seen of this in the ‘Arab Spring.’

Drink driving is not acceptable any more.

Under age sex - child adult relationships is now not only frowned, it has rightly become utterly unacceptable and the word of the child is more likely to be accepted than it was in the past - during the 1970’s there was even a group that was considered politically acceptable PIE - Paedophile Information Exchange (google it and you’ll be uncomfortably surprised) This lot were trying to reduce the age of consent through political means and they had their advocates in mainstream parties.

Attitudes to sex have changed, the idea of the nurse in uniform as a sex object has diminished greatly, and that is just one small part of the changes.

The fall of the communist bloc, never thought that would happen back in the 1960’s and 70’s

The growth of China as a market and producer - was always though of as a sleeping giant, well it has pretty much woken up and we have only seen it shaking off the slumberings, just wait until it rouses itself fully, same goes for India

Cars, you get in one, turn the key and it goes, for maybe 15-20k before services, the mobility of personal transport has changed UK society, where we live, entertain, work - and that one household can have more than one of them too!

46

Many, but I’m going to stick to the great American tradition of owning cars:

Up until the late 70’s, we had one car. Dad and another co-worker carpooled, so Mom had a rigid schedule on the days she could get her grocery and clothes shopping done (because it’s the day the other dude drove). (She still follows that schedule today.) If she needed the car for something special, we’d have to drop Dad off at work and then pick him up when his shift was over.

“Cruising the strip” - Teenagers used to drive around in their cars for entertainment. We drove for miles. My friend, Scott, and I used to drive the circle freeway around Cincinnati, with Pink Floyd (on 8-track) blaring. Kids don’t do that anymore. Maybe it’s the price of gas.

Teenagers used to look forward to driving. I know lots of kids who didn’t get their driver’s licenses until they were 17 or 18, including my daughter’s boyfriend, because they didn’t want to.

A teenager owning his/her own car was rare. It usually meant that the teenager had worked his/her ass off to buy it. Kids whose parents bought them their cars were looked on as spoiled and lazy. Now, most teenagers get a car on their 16th birthday, at least in our social circles.

Cars had their own social ladder. Camaros were drooled over. At the bottom of the ladder was the Pinto. Girls could drive Pintos and get away with it; not boys. You don’t pick up a hot girl in a Pinto. Nowadays, lots of kids drive around in the cheapest cars, Kias, and they’re not ridiculed. Not only has the quality of the cheap cars gone up, but cars themselves have become homogenized.

47

Same-sex marriage. This has to be #1, because even though I came out in 1963, I never would have imagined that SSM would be legal anywhere in my lifetime. The concept was so alien as to be unthinkable. And gay rights in general. In the '60s you could get arrested, or worse, just being in a gay bar. The vice squad would come in, arrest people, rough them up, take them to jail, print their names and addresses in the paper, and sometimes beat the crap out of them . . . or worse. People lost their families, their jobs, and sometimes their lives, just for being in a bar.
End of the Cold War. Yes, those ICBMs are no longer hanging over our heads 24/7. No more air-raid shelters, no more “duck & cover.”

Women’s equality. I remember back in the '50s, my mother told me that in the Soviet Union, women could be doctors or engineers or truck drivers. That just seemed strange to me. And when you watched the news on TV, you watched middle-aged men, period. If there were any women, they were “weather girls,” who knew nothing more than how to point at a map. I recently watched a panel of economists on CNN; they were all 30-something women.

Organized religion. Back in the late '60s, a lot of us thought that within a few years, organized religion would be a thing of the past.

Dress codes in schools. When I was in (public) high school, the boys couldn’t have hair over their collar or ears. No jeans, no t-shirts, no shorts, no tennis shoes. And naked swimming classes. For the girls, it was knee-length skirts, and no pants, shorts, t-shirts or patent-leather shoes. One of our school’s principles would stop girls in the hallway and tell them to get down on their knees. If a girl’s skirt touched the floor, she got sent home.

When we were kids, we were allowed to play outside all day, with no restrictions. Nobody had ever heard of a kid being abducted. We were just told not to talk to strangers, and that was it.

48

And not just smoking in bars, but smoking in every nook and cranny. Watch Mad Men or a movie like JFK to see how all-pervasive smoking was not too long ago.

49

I was born in 1983 so I can remember limited amounts of smoking in public spaces, but even in childhood I remember my father a smoker going outside because most places banned it. I can’t remember a single rude smoker though when asked to please go elsewhere.

What shocked me was the cycle gay rights went through, both repealing sodomy laws AND gay marriage debate. The best evidence I have ever seen for gay marriage being a major issue of debate was some editorial written in the 70s by college students. It seemed like these issues where close to being settled in the 90s, but then didn’t and became major issues later on. Maybe it was living in Houston we had a copy of the gay and lesbian yellow pages on our table(I’m not even sure what exactly that was).

Same deal with marijuana legalization, I’ve even seen people saying it always seems right around the corner but then goes dormant for a decade.

Public attitudes to alcohol in the USA seem at their most negative since prohibition though, being outside with beer on your breath is enough to get you a public intoxication ticket. I think there have been a few cases of diabetics ticketed that raised a furor.

50

For the Stones, thirteen on the live recording. Anyway, good point. Hard to believe that just two or three years prior, they couldn’t sing “Let’s Spend the Night Together” on TV (had to change it to “Let’s Spend some Time Together”). I guess this speaks to two things: how much things changed between January 1967 and late 1968; and, how sex in general was sort of a taboo subject for much of mainstream society, yet WHEN it was broached, the statutory rape was not so universally condemned as it is now. Or something like that.

51

I’ll take this even further, I still run into people very young who don’t seem to understand how intimate the internet can really make you despite distances. They really don’t get a distance relationship, like asking if back before we got married if my wife and I had heard from each other recently.:dubious: They don’t seem to understand despite my explanation that not only did we see other other in full video and audio at least daily but I often walked around the house wearing a blue tooth earpiece on with a constant audio channel when I was home. This was back in in the mid 00’s, now with smartphones and broadband over cell networks you could basically have a 24/7 teleprescene on the other side of the world.

52

The idea of sex crimes. The only sex crime in my youth was rape, which meant penis/vagina penetration, and the woman was always seen as “asking for it”; i.e. she was walking alone at night, wearing a tight skirt, had had sex before, yada, yada, yada.

Now, any type of unwanted contact is a crime, and “blaming the victim” is less (though not totally disappeared).

And speaking of water who thought coffee would be such a huge industry. I remember when your choices were regular or decaf.

53

Individual control of media.

When I was young, you basically watched movies and TV on a schedule set by somebody else. You watched a TV show when it was broadcast. You watched a movie during the week it was playing in the theatre. If you missed it, oh well, you were never going to see it. If you were lucky, they might rerun a TV episode one time a few months later or sell the series into syndication. And a movie might eventually get broadcast on TV. But you had no control over these things. You just had to wait until they were showing what you wanted to see.

54

My first job out of college, (1985) people smoked in their cubical. If your office mate smoked, and it was in issue for you, maybe you could get moved to another office, or maybe you just got told to quit whining. Within less than three years, smoking inside the building was done. Also when I started out, only about 1/5 of the engineers had computers on their desks. 3 years later that was up to about 3/5.

The next job we used to bring in beer on friday afternoons. My boss had a bottle of burbon in his desk. ALL the engineers had computers at that job. Sometime several, as we designed computer hardware, and you needed stuff for testing. The beer fridays only lasted a year or two.

55

A few things I didn’t mention:

Divorce. I can remember when divorce was rare, and a huge stigma for the woman. Being known as a “divorcée” was severely looked down on by society.

And bearing a child “out of wedlock.” Another huge stigma. Only a slut* would have a baby outside of marriage, but today a woman can have multiple kids with multiple fathers and remain single. As long as she’s able to take care of them, no one cares.

  • Even the word “slut” has lost its edge.

And porn. You had to go out of your way to find it. Or even frontal nudity was something you never saw unless you knew where to go for it.

56

n/m

57

Cancer, especially breast cancer. It used to be a big secret, spoken of in hushed tones. Now it’s a cause for rallies and fundraisers and shaving your head in solidarity and not wearing a wig to cover chemo-related hair loss if you don’t feel like it. It’s still a bitch but at least others don’t treat you like a pariah.

58

Prescription drugs. I remember when you took them when you felt sick to make you well, and then stopped. Nowadays, any little thing that might maybe be wrong with you, that’s a prescription. The drug companies have got most people convinced that if they don’t take a drug for their high blood pressure/high cholestoral/slight depression/whatever, they will drop dead tomorrow.

59

IMHO this is indicative of a large change - our culture is very fearful now about childrens safety and this manifests in numerous ways. I see many children today who are not at all independent of their parents, certainly not in rebellion like we were. With all of the independence we had there was a lot of exploring and learning associated with it. Teenagers don’t want to get their drivers licenses because they are used to being taken everywhere, why change?

It will be interesting to see where it all leads…

60

Before the late 70s or early 80s, date rape and spousal rape weren’t acknowledged at all. The idea that a man could be imprisoned for raping his own wife or girlfriend was beyond absurd.