I’m glad you had such a pleasant upbringing. Really. My mother was brought up in a home where she got to see her father viciously beat her mother on a near daily basis. This was in a small Midwestern town, exactly the type of community you have such nostalgia for.
Conversely, many people I know have kids. They dote on them and try to instill good moral values in them.
Families are families. There are good and bad, there always have been and there always will be. There has always been alcoholism and drug abuse and other bad things. It’s just the human condition. Indulging in rose colored nostalgia doesn’t help solve any current problem.
When I was a kid, I lived in a Kelvinator refrigerator box in a grimy alley littered with broken syringes and human waste, surrounded by pimps and hustlers and whores, sometimes without no food or water for months on end. I had a dead cockroach for a pet, and the only toy I owned was a discarded tattoo gun I called Mr. Buzzy. The days were long and the nights were longer. That’s when they all came out— all the lowlifes, scumbags, hoohahs, twinkies, sno-balls, dingdongs, scudbusters, bushbabies, flibbertigibbets, assgaskets and poodleskirts— all of them hungry and on the prowl for a hot piece of underage urchin-tail like me. I knew I’d never see my tenth birthday. I just didn’t know if the tonsillitis or the syphilis would get me first.
Yes, someone expressly said there was not a society like that. And you’re full of crap claiming it was on the backs of those living in hell. My parents lived through the Depression. they weren’t given free phones or bus passes or credit cards for food. By some miracle of a high school education they figured out how to delay having children until they could afford them. They WERE the poor. The difference between living in hell and living a good life is the ability to work with friends and neighbors to make a neighborhood a nice place to live. Children weren’t allowed to skip school or run rampant in the streets. Money had nothing to do with it.
My dad worked all manner of shit jobs until he could afford the tools he used to build the first house we lived in. He started building the house BEFORE going to the bank at a time when banks wouldn’t consider such a loan. He was able to prove himself capable of finishing the work. He wasn’t an engineer, he wasn’t a carpenter. He was self taught and able to draw up the specs to the house to the banks satisfaction. That was based on a high school education from a man raised by his grand parents because his mother was an unmarried teenager.
All of my friend’s parents had similar experiences growing up. What you call utopia is what we called normal, responsible parenting. So you can locate your liberal fantasy world of privilege where the sun produces the least amount of Vitamin D.
You have a dead cockroach? Man, I woulda killed for a dead cockroach.
In the 40’s and 50’s, my grandfather was drinking himself to death. But managed to produce a son who proceeded to drink himself to death after producing me in the 60s. Oddly enough, both of them looked down on me because I preferred my drugs a different way.
What strikes me about the kid in the car seat (the news link photo is blurred, but I’ve seen the original photos elsewhere) is that the kid doesn’t look upset at all, he’s just chillin’. As if, you know, this event is a routine, everyday thing for him.
Not to hijack the thread, but aceplace57 and Magiver are spot on.
I grew up in the 70s and spent a lot of time at my friends’ homes. It was all Brady Bunch. Moms would make lunch, we would play. There was no abuse or dysfunctionality. This is antidotal, of course, and I understand there were exceptions.
After we were run out of West Virginia for not being Christian enough (well, yeah, Dad was Jewish and mom was Catholic, which for some was almost as bad) we wound up in the Detroit area. In the 1970’s everyone’s mom was looking for work because dad was laid off due to the auto industry going down the toilet so we were all learning to make our own lunch. Our next door neighbor’s kid OD’d on heroin and was carried out on a stretcher dead as a doornail. Another neighbor regularly beat his wife and daughter to bloody pulps - cue more stretchers. His son, though remained untouched. One classmate shot his father but was acquitted as self-defense. Another shot both his parents and was jailed. “Fist-fights” bad enough to break bones were a regular feature at school. By high school that was upped to knife fights. Nobody did a damn thing about this shit because the adults were so damned determined to maintain the myth of a “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” existence.
The reality is that the myth was reality only for a small subset of white, Christian, middle-class people, and usually mostly for the boys and men. If you had an idyllic childhood good for you, but your experience was far from universal.
So, exactly like now? Moms who serve snacks and kids playing at each other’s homes is not something that went out in the 50s. Sometimes I wonder where some of you have been for the last 60 years.
Yes THIS, Jesus Christ on rollerskates, THIS. We just are no longer insulated or subject to a tacit institutional censorship of “some things are not discussed in polite company”.
The details of my life are quite inconsequential… very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum… it’s breathtaking- I highly suggest you try it.
Oh, he’s very popular Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads - they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.
Again, I’m happy you had a happy upbringing. But so what? There’ve been happy and unhappy families throughout history. Tolstoy wrote about it. This isn’t a particularly controversial claim. Alcoholism has existed throughout history. It was so bad in the 19th and early 20th century, the state tried to ban it. So has abuse, abandonment, adultery and every human vice. They weren’t invented in the 1960s. The current heroin epidemic is a new phenomena, at least as it’s spreading into largely white suburban/rural areas, but nostalgic pining for a non-existent trouble free past isn’t going to help.
One of the reasons Prohibition came about is that people saw the effects that alcohol was having on the family. You’d have men (and women) spending their entire paychecks on booze, leaving nothing to take care of their families. Granted the movement ended up being a total failure. But it wasn’t all about “drinking is a sin!!!”
Before heroin, there was opium. Prostitution and venereal disease were rampant. Life wasn’t all sunshine and roses.
I personally had a fairly happy childhood. One of my best friends in high school, however, had to grow up with two alcoholics who would lock her and her brother and sister outside the house in the summer time so they could spend the day getting hammered. She’d come home from school and they’d be down at the local dive and come home completely shitfaced. Once her parents were fighting and their dog jumped on her dad to protect her mom. Her dad took the dog out back and shot him in the head. Another friend had been molested by his stepdad when he was a kid.
I myself also had several relatives who were drinking themselves into a stupor. My favorite aunt wound up drinking herself to death. A great-aunt (another alcoholic), left her first husband because he beat her.
You mention some fifties TV shows, but they’re just that – TV shows. Hell, look at what was going on behind the scenes. Ozzie and Harriet may have been happy, but their son, Rick Nelson’s first marriage was extremely rocky. His wife was an alcoholic, and their divorce was very public and very bitter.
Lucille Ball’s and Desi Arnaz’s marriage wasn’t all that happy. Part of the reason they developed the show as that she was hoping that working together would improve their relationship. Arnaz was a heavy drinker and cheated on her.
Robert Reed, who played Mike Brady was gay at a time when homosexuals were seen as little more than perverts. He remained closeted for most of his life.
Yes, there were people who were happy growing up. On the other hand, many were miserable. This is not a recent phenomenon. Suicide, drug abuse, domestic violence – there’s nothing new under the sun. If you had a happy childhood (and I include myself in that catagory), consider yourself fortunate. You may not have known anyone who had a shitty upbringing, but trust me, it happened. The only difference now is the advent of mass media – we hear about it more, so we think it’s more common than it used to be. That and if someone was molested, or abused, or was abusing drugs or alcohol, it was hushed up. No one talked about it.