[RANT]
I wasn’t around when cars had to be “hand-cranked” to be started, but I’ve seen it plenty of times in old movies to know about it. I’ve seen numerous old movies where callers are shown dialing on rotary phones. And these aren’t old black and white movies…
[/RANT]
SA, it looks like you hold the same notion that you say others inexplicably have, simply turned on its head. IOW, you are relating “civility” with “oppression of minorities”, when such a linkage may not have a causative relationship. Your first post in the thread says:
How can we say that one had to do with the other? It looks like you’re assuming that the abolishment of socially-acceptable inequities was acheived through the abandonment of certain social mores that included basic courtesy (I gleaned that from the “baby thrown out with the bath water” remark). Is this what you’re saying? If so, it seems to me you are making the same false assumption that the woman in pinkfreud’s anecdote did (i.e that being kind and polite has anything to do with respecting equality).
I’m sure I probably just misunderstood you, though.
And reading skills. Sheesh.
(see my first post in this thread 
)
I believe you have. My post which you quote was in answer to the attitude that seems prevalent these days wherein whenever someone mentions how much more polite and civilized people were 50 or 60 years ago, someone will point out in an accusatory tone that it was an era rife with oppression and inequality – as though the two went hand in hand.
While it’s true that that era was indeed rife with such oppression (as had our country’s history, not just the fifties and sixties), it wasn’t caused by politeness and civility. Yet many people nowadays seem to feel that for one to long for or wish to return to a more polite, civilized and well-mannered era is tantamount to wishing for a return to racial and sexual discrimination.
It was this attitude that my comments were meant to address.
However, I think I’ve got it all figured out now. 
It all began for the most part (in answer to betenoir’s post about that era begetting the generation that started the turmoil in the first place) with the dual impact of the Kennedy assassination, which cost America much of its innocence, and the arrival of the Beatles.
Yes, laugh all you want, but they were the catalyst (and I’m as big a fan as they ever had). As soon as their music hit the American shores, kids wanted to grow their hair long (remember the Beatle cut?) and wear Beatle boots and funny clothes. This caused a great rift with the adult generation.
Following the Beatles’ early days came the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, etc. who were not as wholesome. They garnered rabid fans as well, and they led to even more unappealing modes of dress and behavior. Soon, everyone was running around with scraggly beards, smoking pot, doing acid and wearing weird clothes.
This caused a huge generation gap.
Then we have Vietnam, a sorry pulled-punches war that accomplished very little but to waste tens of thousand of American lives. It became a rallying point for the younger generation and further widened the gap between generations.
Thus, the overriding anger that Beware of Doug spoke of. Racial equality, women’s rights, and sexual permissiveness became the new rallying points, and it was out with the old and in with the new. Everything about the previous generations’ way of life was ridiculed and scorned and tossed by the wayside in favor of the new order.
And while many things are better now as a result, the fact remains that not everything about the good old days was bad ( ), yet the baby was thrown out with the bath water in terms of politeness, dress and civility in order to effect these changes, and it was not necessary to do so. They were innocent casualties of the cultural war that began during that time and which pretty much continues to this day.
The ironic thing, though, is that many of the critics of the way things are now are the same baby-boomers who were instrumental in setting the wheels in motion to bring about these changes in the first place.
Such are the effects of maturity.
I prefer “codger.” I’m 55 (yeah, I know, just a pup.) I don’t side with all that “things were better then” stuff. For example, cars were unsafe compared with cars today. No seat belts, so you went right through the windshield onto the street, if you had a crash. The driver often got impaled on the non-collapsing steering column. I’ll take airbags, thanks.
Unlike Pinkfreud, I have never had anyone give me so much as a dirty look for opening a door for somebody. I do it a lot, and not just for women.
No, we didn’t have calculators, but my brother had a slide rule for his calculus class. Slide rules aren’t precise, but would tell you approximately what the answer would be, when you puzzled it out with a pencil. If the answers were way apart, one of your methods was mistaken.
I don’t think we mean that “nothing” is better now. Clearly, a great many things are. Some of which are a result of the social upheaval of the sixties and early seventies, and some of which are the result simple technological progress. I’m just saying there were many good things that existed during that previous era that were good and which were tossed aside needlessly, and our society today is worse off as a result. It might be nice if now that we’ve pretty much done away with racial and sexual discrimination we could return to a type of civilized behavior that is less rude, ill-mannered and aggressive as is so often the case these days.
Starving Artist, when the waltz first became popular, the old coots were saying it was immoral-you were dancing so close and so fast! Shocking!
When a male ballet dancer neglected to wear trunks over his tights at the Russian Ballet, and the Dowager Empress walked out in a huff, he was kicked out of the company. In nineteen fucking thirteen.
In the 20s, the flappers were loose, and the elders complained about the crazy jazz music, how immoral these kids were-society was going to hell! In the thirties and forties, it was swing and zoot suits.
It didn’t start with the Beatles or Elvis or Zeppelin. It’s ALWAYS BEEN THERE.
[Old Coot Rant]"What’s going on with these short buses these kids have these days? Why, back in my day we had long buses! It would take you half an hour to walk down the aisle. And we had to do it uphill! Both ways!..[/Old Coot Rant]
To a certain degree, yes. But I think the impact of the waltz, the flappers, etc. was miniscule to the social upheaval that was triggered by the Beatles. Perhaps a few girls were flappers, but an entire generation started growing Beatle haircuts and wearing Carnaby Street clothing and incurring the wrath of their elders on a scale that I don’t believe has occurred at any other time in this country’s history, and which was only made worse by the more grubby styles and types of behavior that were to follow. And of course, the wrath of the older generation was equaled by the resentment of the younger generation toward the attitudes of their parents’ generation, which then ultimately led, by sheer dint of numbers on the part of the baby boomers, to the abandonment of, among other things, the more polite, civilized and mannerly values of the older generation.
In my opinion, that is.
Perhaps television is what made the difference? While everyone talks about the Jazz Age as though flapper dresses were a national craze, my limited knowledge seems to suggest that it was really only popular in large cities, none of which had suburbs back then, and it became popular very slowly because it couldn’t be transmitted fast enough.
But in the 60s, changes came like lightning. Everyone from a city dweller to a suburbanite to someone in the Tennessee foothills could have seen the Beatles perform on Ed Sullivan in one night. Think of it… I’m aware of no single moment in the Jazz Age where a cultural shift happened. But with the Beatles, it was instant. Millions of boys changed their hairstyles overnight. Millions of girls came down with Beatlemania.
Until that moment, such a quick, radical and widespread cultural shift had been unprecedented. And yet thanks to TV, it would not be the last by a long shot. I think that may have been what caused the 60s to be seen as a more divisive decade than any before it in the 20th century.
Of course, I’m a whippersnapper, so if anyone thinks I’m wrong, please tell me; I’d be interested to hear some different opinions.
Well, you’re a pretty perceptive whippersnapper, I must say.
I think you hit a very important nail right on the head!
Not only in terms of the Beatles, but the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam protests, Haight-Asbury, love-ins, bra-burnings, etc. – all were brought home simulaneously to everyone around the country by television and the influence was incalculable.
You could always cobble together your own, like this guy did. 
That’s odd. If you’re talking about a survey of seventeen year-olds from ten years ago, then the respondents are a year older than me. When I was a kid, every person I knew had a rotary phone.
But “in olden times” how many people were taught advanced algebra or calculus? My high school had not one but two years of calculus (granted, they were advanced classes). I imagine modern math students deal with graphs a lot more than students in the past did.
None.
I read here about 7th graders learning the quadratic formula. I had two years of high school algebra, 1936-37 and never heard of it until I took college algebra after WWII.
My daughter’s high school sophmore chemistry in 1983 was more complete and detailed than was my college chemistry was in 1946.
I’m all in favor of the use of calculators. In all of history, the goal of people who use mathematics as a tool, as opposed to those who study mathematics itself, has been to make computation easier. Logarithms being an outstanding example of this. Most people aren’t all that interested in the study of mathematics and won’t do well at it. Anything that makes it easier and allows them to get the right answer is fine, I think.
Enough of the theory should be included to spark an interest in those who have a mathematical gift and elective math courses should be available to them. To make everyone suffer through mathematical proofs is a waster of time in my opinion.
To recall an old post of mine from another thread, all this puts me in mind of this Archie comic from the mid-Eighties or so where the characters are transported into a rose-colored version of the early 1900’s. Because y’know, back then, “the people were purer” as well as the air, and “women were treated as more than equals.”
I didn’t get it then, but I get it now. Heh.
Well, Leaper, I can’t speak for everyone else but for myself I have to say I have no rose colored glasses. Things weren’t perfect fifty or sixty years ago and neither were the people. Far from it. It’s only when compared with the way things are now that they seem ideal.