I know many, many conservatives who constantly bitch about how wonderful America was in the 1950s and how much it’s gone downhill since then.
My sister’s husband is very much like that. He’s a Trump Republican. He’s constantly going on and on about how the liberals are ruining America by engaging in a war on Christmas and whatever else Fox News is blathering on about that day.
One visit he started his conversation gambit with “America lost its moral edge in the 1950s.” Yip, America was a great country before, and now it’s terrible because gays are allowed to be open. Backs can drink from their same water fountain and can fuck our women. People have long hair. Dogs and cats living together and other abominations, as seen on Fox News.
I just see my racist asshole of a brother-in-law anytime people start going on and on about how good things used to be.
In real terms, just about everything is cheaper than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. With the possible exception of energy, give the fluctuations in pricing.
The fifities brought in a lot of new things that nobody had had before, and the general level of affluence was higher than it had ever been before.
But; air pollution you could practically chew on. A cheerful lack of concern for pollution or the environment - problems that we only noticed later.
As for living in the fifties, while medicine and dentistry were better than what went before, this was the time when injections really hurt, when antiseptics came from a bottle and stung like hell, and all manner of medical treatment we take for granted nowadays did not exist.
As someone at great risk of sunburn, I seem to recall that some not very effective sunscreen was available back then, but only with a low SPF factor for a long time. That took a while to change; I remember first finding a factor 15 sunscreen in the eighties, and how sticky and gritty it was.
They weren’t as ubiquitous as the Sears and JC Penney’s catalogs, but they did exist. IIRC, they were higher-end and you had to specifically request one; they weren’t just sent out the way the others were.
My grandmother was born in 1916. Sometime in the 90’s, she was reading one of those pieces about how glorious the old days were. She said “Listen, those people sure weren’t in the kitchen! It was always hot and you had to work all day just to get the house clean and three meals on the table. The best sound in the world is sitting in this chair listening to the central air cool the house while machines wash my dishes and clothes and I can watch the Braves on cable!”
I’ve been moving my parents back home to a small rural community, so I’ve been hearing the “we know all our neighbors” crap for the past few weeks. I was able to point out that not only do I know my neighbors in my crowded neighborhood near the University of Texas, but due to the fact that we have a neighborhood news group, I know how to contact them immediately at any time even when I’m on the other side of the state.
I’m always seeing that silly statement about how people used to leave their doors unlocked. That’s more of an indication of naivete than of how safe the neighborhood is. Think about it: you’re a thief. You live in a crap neighborhood. You decide to check cars and homes for unlocked doors so you can lift some computers, phones, jewelry, bikes, guns, etc to turn into cash. Are you going to fish in your local watering hole where your neighbors have as little as you do? Or are you going to drive a few miles to the part of town where people feel safe so they are careless about leaving their doors unlocked and their valuables left in the car?
I don’t have any longing for our one bathroom, one tv (b&w) with three channels, one window unit to cool the whole house lifestyle of my childhood. I like being cool and comfortable. I CAN cook all my meals from scratch and sew my own clothes. I do cook most of my meals from scratch, but have no qualms about having a Doordash account, too. I’d rather take ten minutes to shop on Amazon than spend my Saturdays cutting out patterns on the floor.
The good old days are a nice place to visit in reminiscences, but I wouldn’t take them back on a platter.
'll and speaking of platters, take a look at cookbooks from past years. Tell me again how great it was as you enjoy your tomato aspic.
People were in charge. Nowadays, if all the technology went down, the majority of people could not function. I consider this to be the second age of American slavery: We are slaves to technology.
The whole “diet-and-exercise” craze is totally out of hand. In the olden days, you ate what you wanted when you wanted. And nobody criticized your food choices.
Yeah, no one had to take classes on how to repair a horse.
Actually things are a lot more reliable now then they used to be. No more dashing off to the drugstore to use their tube tester. My TV, which is not all that expensive, is from before the smart TV age. None of the TVs we had when I was a kid lasted nearly as long. My car is over 9 years old and has had almost no mechanical problems. I’ll trade that for the days when you could tune up your car - and had to.
Well, people were a lot thinner back then, I think. The reason for the diet-and-exercise craze of today is partly because of the ongoing obesity and diabetes epidemic.
Yesterday it occurred to me how great it is to live today. Had my hands full with my high energy 2.5 year old and her 7 month old sister, but was able to tend to them while concurrently washing a load of whites, vacuuming the bedrooms, and mopping the living room floor. Thanks to my washing machine, my Roomba vacuum, and my Braava robot mop, I didn’t have to stress myself over these household chores. In fact, me and the girls (and the cat) had fun watching the robots whirling around.
Back in the “good ole days”, there was no way I could’ve gotten the same amount of work done in the same amount of time. My ancestors would’ve killed to have access to the technology that I take for granted.
Plus being able to (safely for you and the kids) go to the store to grab some baby wipes and disposable diapers. Sure, they were first introduced in the late 40’s, but they didn’t start going into wide spread use until the 70’s (our first kids we still used the clothe kind and a diaper cleaning service). You are right…our ancestors, even the really recent ones, would have been stunned and probably would have killed for much of the things we take for granted today. Hell, I’d have been willing to do serious harm to folks just to have had access to all the toys we have today.
Vets are like repair people. Horses have no user fixable parts inside.
Well almost none. My daughter to reach in to clean the sheath, I think they call it, of her horse. Ugh.
Vets make house calls like the old TV repairmen did - but are even more expensive. I know this for a fact.
Ha! Worked one summer in the bindery at WF Hall in Chicago where they printed em. Saw (and stacked) more of em than I could count. Monkey Wards too. (And Playboys!)
Things are better for the mentally and physically impaired. In the olden days, they would either be kept at home doing nothing, or be shuffled off to an institution until the died. I remember hearing on the news about a deaf woman who died in the institution she had lived in for 99 years. Nobody knew who she was, as she had been left at the building when she was about four years old!
OTOH, quirky people are no longer allowed to live clean and sober. The solution to any mental illness is to do drugs. When I was diagnosed with “situation depression,” I was told to get on disability, stay in the same situation, and do drugs.
My great-grandmother was a farmgirl; she got hired as a servant by a Big House when she was 13, and off to the Big City she went. Eventually she married a charming man who wasn’t all that good at the “providing” part and became a laundress; first she would go to her clients’ homes to do the washing there in the client’s through, then she came up with a novel business model where she’d pick up the clothes and return them washed and ironed (her home had a common through for all the neighbors), eventually she was able to buy this wonderful machine with rollers you rolled with a crank that made the washing much faster…
I barely remember her, but family reports say that one time when she was asked about her opinion on modern washing machines, she said “best invention ever!” And that was before they did the washing in half an hour like mine does.
That’s partly a feature of the American medical system, which is built among other things on ensuring that as many people as possible take as many drugs as possible. The concept of a 51yo who isn’t on any kind of daily medication is incomprehensible to American insurers; in France, the UK or Spain that response may at most be met with a verification that I don’t take the Pill.
