Yep, but it’s a much better situation now. I vividly remember the shoulders and medians of roadways littered with lots of trash, and most people thought it was normal. The crying Indian commercial helped to bring more awareness to the situation.
All one has to do is drive through the outskirts of towns and cities in poor countries to see how much trash is still thrown from vehicles or dumped roadside. Most of the USA looks positively pristine by comparison. Pre mid-1960s that was much less true in the USA.
Like all cures of social ills, I’ll hesitate to predict that littering will stay fixed in the USA. It might. I hope it does. But it might not.
Consider yourself lucky. I had to walk 500 miles to school every day, downhill both ways—and it was down a steep, craggy mountain cliff, full of Nile crocs and mosquito fogger trucks!
I grew up (1970s) in a rural area of Ohio, on two acres with a creek. You’d think wildlife would have been a common sighting. Nope. We’d see the occasional squirrel, but I never saw a deer, fox, or skunk. I remember my dad would travel 50 miles to a semi-wooded area of Ohio to go deer hunting, and he’d be lucky to see just one deer (let alone bag one).
Thanks to conservation efforts, the population of most wildlife in Ohio has exploded over the past few decades. (We may now have too many of them.)
This plot is for Ohio only:
Although my mom learned to do laundry on a washboard, by the time I was born nearly everyone had washing machines. Grandma had one with a wringer, but she had one.
I was in fourth grade before we got a drier and in seventh grade before “permanent press” was a thing. So the old days included hanging out laundry to dry and then ironing them.
@Crafter_Man yeah, that graph looks like Wisconsin! when I was a kid in the early 60’s it was a rare sight to see a deer here, mobilizing all the neighborhood to come out to see it. Now I see dozens some days.
This reminds me of something I saw a long time ago, “The Bad Old Good Old Days”. LOL
Kids in the old days were homeschooled physics lessons about heat and combustion: they played with matches. (At least I did. When I was about 10 years old, I lit, blew out, and re-lit a candle probably one to two dozen times. My father said, “My son is a firebug!” but never took the matches away from me.)
ETA: I would also get packs of matches for free from cigarette vending machines in restaurants. Couldn’t buy the cigarettes though. Dad wouldn’t lend me the change.
Yeah.
Parents then were a lot better about letting kids discover the hazards of life via the Braille method: just stick you hand in there and see what happens. If it’s something bad, odds are you’ll remember next time. Much more effective than a hundred “Don’t do [whatever]!” screeches from hectoring scaredy-cat overprotective modern parents. Losers raising losers.
This thread is not about what you think was actually better in the so-called “Good Old Days,” but things you probably forgot about or choose not to remember that were not actually good.
Back in the good old days, when men beating their wives was just considered their own private business no one else should concern themselves with and the concept of marital rape didn’t exist.
In the Old Days, cars were never expected to last more than 100,000 miles, so they didn’t even bother putting the 6th digit on the odometer. Most of them went to the junkyard well before that point. They don’t build 'em like that anymore!
And if you got in an accident, you were much more likely to die. Ironically, emergency rooms started seeing a lot more car accident victims after they started putting seat belts in cars. Because before that, people died in the crash and never made it to the hospital.
Somehow, the “thinking” that seatbelts were bad was that it was better (read: more likely to survive) to be thrown out of the car rather than be trapped inside. Of course, that’s how much conventional wisdom is worth.
It’s the only government program I’ve seen (i.e. wildlife conservation initiatives) that has become too successful. The deer population has become so great in Michigan that disease and starvation is becoming a problem.
Oh, irony. I’ve heard of that.
It’s because they protected the deer but didn’t bring back the wolves. Rookie mistake.
Yeah. But once they do bring back the wolves pretty soon we’ll need to reintroduce saber-toothed cats to control the wolf population.
Don’t forget not being allowed to even wade in water before a half hour after you’ve eaten!
Yes, a car with 100k miles on the engine was at the end of it’s life, if it even made it that far. Sloppy tolerances and the pistons, rings, etc were just worn out by then. Now 100k miles on an engine is just being broke in.
And we tied an onion to our belts because that was the style at the time.
Lets not forget about us kids fishing and swimming in creeks that people dumped raw sewage in and companies dumped toxic chemicals in on a regular basis. Fun times.
Lotta common decorative plants had highly poisonous fruits, berries, or seeds. Parents told us not to eat random stuff and most of us kids listened to them most of the time. That was good enough; only the stupid died, and not even too many of them.