Twice I’ve had health care providers ask me “What medications do you take.” I shot back “I don’t do drugs.” Whereupon I was informed that “I was asking about medications, not drugs.” And I’ve been told “That’s not drugs. It’s medication.”
Does getting it on a prescription make it any better or even different? I remember the 1960’s, when people (mostly women) were given prescriptions for all kinds of psychotropic drugs without the doctor giving a thought. “Mother’s Little Helper” indeed.
I would say the one unequivocally better thing in the past was privacy and space to yourself. These are fast becoming bizarre notions to the generations growing up today in a world where everyone is pretty much contactable and trackable 24/7 unless they go out of their way not to be as much as is possible. Unless you’re one of the few hold outs who still use actual cash, all of your purchases are no longer private. Everywhere you go outside of your home, you are being watched by CCTV cameras, in some places with facial recognition technology. Drones increasingly buzz around the sky. For most people, your biometric data is on file somewhere, whether because you have a passport or driver’s license that requires it, or you use your thumbprint to log into your smartphone, which also conveniently tracks your location 24/7 along with your banking and social media and everything else that you do on that phone that reveals massive amounts of data about your private life. Even at work, your computer is probably logging every single key you hit so your boss can keep an eye on you, as if the panopticon of the open-place office didn’t make that easy enough already. And nowadays people just accept their lack of privacy as the norm when in fact it is the most abnormal human experience in all of human history. Back in the '50s, all of this was just Orwellian science fiction. Now, we are actually living in the technological dystopia and few people even seem to care anymore.
You can say it’s to keep us safe all you want, but just imagine if the technology available today were available in Europe in the 1930s. History would have turned out very differently for millions of people. With this level of technological surveillance, there is no way of escaping if the wrong person comes into power (or if you happen to live in China, where they won’t even see this post because this site is probably blocked anyway). The biggest change in the last 20 years is that we now have the infrastructure in place that every single dictator in world history would have loved to have had. I wager that sooner or later what we’ve allowed to happen to us is going to be humanity’s biggest regret. Whether it’s people making stupid decisions at election time or hackers taking over the system, eventually someone is going to take advantage of this technological infrastructure for their own ends. It may not happen in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our children or grandchildren, but mark my words - eventually it will happen.
born in 1947–the 50 and 60’s had plenty of what were called “B” movies, which supplied drive-ins with product
It’s been a while so it may already have been mentioned but traffic was far less congested and, up to a point, stressful. Of course, the offsets to that were less reliable cars and more dangerous roads. But I kinda miss the days before even the interstates were endlessly jammed (yes, I’m looking at YOU, I-95 south of DC).
did you forget that so-called “liberal” California had restrictive covenants re: selling to Blacks? Or that they had segregation even for Black celebrities?