Surely most people can agree that there are many such things in nostalgic hindsight, but far fewer that can bear close examination. And that’s why.
Is “the good old days were better” met with widespread animosity? Or is is not closer to the case that “today’s world has gone to Hell and people who share your beliefs are the cause” is met with animosity?
In the case of this particular discussion, there is also the matter that the two sides disagree over what was good or bad, while one side is arguing that there is far more bad than good and is additionally arguing that all the bad is the fault of one particular group.
In that context, your rhetorical question is not even related to this discussion.
I think the disagreement is with the idea that those things which have gotten worse are because of liberals, and those which have gotten better did so in spite of liberals.
It might be worth mentioning that “today’s world has gone to Hell and people who share your beliefs are the cause” was brought up originally in order to counter claims in virtually every forum on this board that conservatives are evil and seek to cause human suffering, when in reality it has been people of a liberal mindset who have created by far the most damage.
I submit that what can’t bear close scrutiny are liberal claims about that time, in which societal ills that literally pale in comparison with the ones that exist now are exaggerated and made to appear both more commonplace than they were in reality, and intentional on the part of the people of that time.
But then we’ve had at least one Doper come right out and say she doesn’t care about the millions of lives that have been or are being lost or ruined by drugs, crime, and children born into disfunctional single-parent homes since the sixties because now she can open her own checking account.
To me that speaks volumes about how things have gotten to where they are today.
I’ve skimmed the thread, and I still don’t see what this has to do with anything. The relative goodness and civility of society didn’t depend on racism or homophobia, nor did it originate from racism or homophobia. Pointing to how bad blacks and gays had it is a red herring. What does the existence of blacks and gays have to do with dressing nicely and being polite?
Which values? Do you really think we are more consumerist now? I have a DVD set of old commercials, and many of them involve the stars of the TV shows pitching products in character. We are much better at separating commercials from entertainment now, even with product placement. In any case, my parents could hardly be considered virtuous for not buying things like microwaves and DVRs which didn’t exist, at least not for consumers.
Couples who both make lots of money today have the freedom for one partner to choose to work or not. I suspect most working women in marriages do it out of necessity. My father did not have a college education, his mother was way too poor to afford for him to take time out from earning money even to go to free City College, but he was still able to afford a house, a nice car, and for my mother to stay home raising us. It was tight, and she went back to work as soon as we were old enough, but I suspect it would not be feasible today no matter how many consumer products you eschew.
Under certain definitions of standard of living. How much do you worry about money?
I feel I have a good standard living not because I have lots of expensive stuff (I don’t want that) but because we don’t have to worry about money. Judging from other Dopers, not many people do.
A good illustration is the Ramona books. In the first ones, from the fifties and sixties, the father worked, the mother stayed home, and they had a comfortable life. Later on the father lost his job, the mother had to work a not very good job, and the stresses of income and expenses hit the kids. I’d say that is a worse standard of living, no matter if they had a color TV instead of black and white.
That makes sense. Counter hyperbole and distortion with hyperbole and distortion.
From various things you’ve written, I believe we are pretty exact contemporaries. All of the guys I knew back then were concerned with one thing: The War in Southeast Asia. I knew guys who gladly joined up & others who took their protests to the Supreme Court. Many of them kept up their deferments–while stating didn’t want to take part because we knew this was not Our Fathers’ War. Others got drafted but went ahead & did their duty, even though they didn’t buy into patriotic claptrap.
Coming from a family with some military* background, I didn’t judge *any *of these guys. (I didn’t know any Chicken Hawks until years later.)
So, Starvin’, since you obviously weren’t one of those protesters–explain what you did in those years. I’m betting on The Tragedy of Flat Feet…
(* As a widow of the Cold War, my mother returned to work after we were all in school. But women in my family, going back as far as I can discover, always worked. Maybe they didn’t have full-time jobs outside the home. But they all took part in money-making tasks rather than sit on their asses as Suburban Wifies. That era was pretty damn short for most American women.)
Let us NOT make this into something personal.
[ /Modding ]
I would say it’s more like countering hyperbole and distortion with an honest assessment of reality.
And FWIW, I’ll answer Bridget Burke’s question. I enlisted in the Navy in January of 1968 and was discharged in November of that year because I have athsma.
Also FWIW, I did disapprove of the Vietnam War because I felt we were fighting a pulled-punches battle in which people were dying needlessly because we didn’t have the gumption to go in there and - in the words of William F. Buckley - “do it right!”
But just like I feel there are other, better ways in which civil and women’s rights could have been acheived, I also didn’t think that becoming a hippie airhead and spitting on returning soldiers who had somehow managed to survive their year in Vietnam was the way to do something about it.
But true conservatives had very little power in the golden age of the '50s. Eisenhower was a Russian spy, remember? (To the Birchers, anyway.) The conservative economic values you seem to hold so dear back then were ultra-high tax rates for the rich, a much smaller income gap than we have today, and massive government public works projects like the interstate highway system. Imagine if Obama proposed all that stuff.
Now socially it is a different story. Pot use is up, but smoking is down - a win I’d say. I don’t think the fact that I had to sneak around to see my girlfriend (now wife) when I visited her in 1972 made me any more moral than my kids who don’t have to worry about that nonsense. People aren’t starving any more. As for gangs, I can assure you that when “West Side Story” premiered it was not necessary for a narrator to explain to audience what this gang thing was.
I guess I missed all those posts filled with solid cites backing up all these assertions. Care to give me a hand by pointing them out for me?
I didn’t see this anywhere either. Pretty shocking stuff. Which poster was that?
And this is why skimming is not a reliable way to take in a thread.
Well, as a conservative, and based on your writings here, I guess you must be among those for whom “reality” is a fluid and ever-malleable concept entirely within your control, and that would explain the above.
For those of us who dwell in the reality based community…not so much.
You provided an “assessment,” above to which I provided a rebuttal. Your response in the ensuing posts has been more emotional appeals to your personal views of the world without ever providing any indication that your initial claims had any basis in fact. (Do you really believe that any majority or plurality of children in the U.S. are not being educated? Do you really believe that there is nowhere in the U.S. that is as safe from crime as 50 years ago? Do you really believe that gangs are everywhere?) I don’t doubt your honesty, but I seriously challenge your ability to assess what you see. That is distortion. And most of your claims are hyperbole.
And just precisely what percentage of Americans were Birchers who thought Eisenhower was a Russian spy? See, this is what exactly I mean about how liberals exaggerate the way things were in the 50’s and 60’s. They pluck some some minor factlet from life in those days and pretend it was common or widespread.
I have no problem with things like interstate highways or NASA. I don’t know why some people have such a hard time differentiating between worthwhile public works which benefit everyone vs. welfare and income redistribution which punishes producers and rewards underachievers and makes them dependent upon government.
With regard to taxes, yeah, in the aftermath of WWII taxes for the very highest income earners were 90%. But there were also no Great Society welfare and Medicare taxes in those days, Social Security withholding was a much smaller percentage of a person’s wages then, and city and state sales taxes were much lower. Sales tax where I grew up was 2%. Overall, taxes on most of America’s workforce are much higher than they were in Eisenhower’s day.
Are you saying that the only way to reduce cigarette smoking is to increase pot smoking. (And come to think of it, why aren’t all the whingers who are so concerned about even second-hand smoke so silent when it comes to weed?)
Perhaps not, but I don’t think a 25% STD rate, schools in which 1 in 8 girls are pregnant and others in which there are contests to see who can get pregnant first, and where even elementary school kids are giving blow jobs in class, speak very highly to the moral superiority of your way of doing things.
They weren’t starving before either. This is yet another example of how people around here exaggerate and distort conditions in what they deride as “the good old days”. I was well into my twenties before the food stamp program ever got underway, and try as I might, I can’t think of a single time when I ever heard or read of someone dying of starvation in this country. That’s not to say it never happened, but people die of starvation today too…and for the same likely reason, which is mental issues that keep them from doing what they need to do to get enough nutrition.
And it was about as accurate a depiction of gang life as Leave It To Beaver is of daily life for the rest of society at the time. It’s a testament to how little gang activity had permeated societal life that that movie was taken seriously by anyone. People these days don’t have such a simplistic idea of gang life anymore, don’t they?
Actually, the distortion lies in your interpretation of what I’ve said. It’s often necessary in the course of discussion to speak in generalities. It goes on around here all the time, as it does elsewhere. Of course I don’t think that 50% of kids are being educated, but that’s a rather low bar, don’t you think? In the 50’s and 60’s (going by failure rates in the schools I attended in the midwest and which I don’t believe were at all atypical based upon the educational level of kids I met from other parts of the country) failure and dropout rates were around 4-to-6%. And this doesn’t even address the quality of education kids get these days, where kids often enter college lacking the basic skills in spelling, punctuation and composition necessary to write a coherent paper.
And yes, there are some pockets here and there where life is as safe from crime as it was in the 50’s, but such areas were commonplace back then. There is no neighborhood I’ve lived in over the last thirty years in which any neighbors within a stone’s throw hasn’t had their lives negatively impacted in some way by drug and/or gang activity, either through having been robbed or having a child or grandchild get caught up in that life. In a recent case, the 20-year-old son of a good friend of mine who was raised in a very nice, comfortable suburban environment, died of a drug overdose after five years of putting his parents through hell with his behavior, which included stealing his parents’ car, getting arrested for driving under the influence of drugs, running with kids who were breaking into houses to get stuff to sell or trade for drugs, etc. He died in April, and, despite his problems, he was still a friendly, lovable kid. I liked him a lot.
Anecdotal evidence? Sure. But I bet there are precious few on this board who couldn’t say the same about the impact of drugs and criminality on their neighbors as well, even if it hasn’t come to someone dying.
And no, I don’t think that gangs are everywhere. But they are bad enough, and their infuence is pernicious - reaching into virtually every aspect of a young person’s life, whether it be at school or the kids they associate with or the music and styles and drugs they get exposed to. In that sense it is everywhere.
But all in all, don’t you think that it’s a pretty dire state of affairs when you’re forced to answer claims about widepread societal ills by asserting that they don’t occur everywhere?
I suppose it’s comparable to how conservatives exaggerate the way things are now, plucking some minor factlet from life these days and pretending it is common or widespread.
Yeah, like that.
I believe that sentence is perfectly adequate as to the effects of modern-day society and the direction it is headed. That stuff was not going on in the 50’s, period. It is now.
It’s one thing to point to incidences of behavior that indicate a future trend, vs. pointing to something in the past and exaggerating the role it played in life at that time in history. The one thing is evidence, the other is fiction.
Thank you.
SA: Wake the hell up to your own words, because your case crumbles further with every over-the-top ridiculous batch of completely unsupported assertions. If that’s your goal, have at it. But if you want to be taken seriously, you need to start demonstrating some connection with real reality, and backing it up.
Exactly! The one has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the other. I’ve been trying to make this argument for sometime now and have gotten nowhere. It’s like the only way to end racism was for everyone to become crass, vulgar, belligerent slobs and go through life dressed like they just came from their kid’s soccer game.
Do you really believe that gangs and drugs and STDs and all the other stuff I’ve brought up were just as bad in the 50’s? Or that women couldn’t get jobs and were enslaved and raped by men at will? Some things are so ridiculous that cites don’t (and can’t) exist to refute them as there’s nothing to base them on.
But of course you already know that, don’t you?