Didnt most communities back then have a “poor side of town” like from that song?
If you had a fax machine back then, you would be a god and would not need to work ever again in your lifetime if you invested the royalties wisely. 
Good times indeed!
To answer the question of the OP: the best thing of the past is that I was younger, the worst thing of the *distant *past (that is, pre 1964) is that I was not yet born.
And the future is no longer what it used to be (this is probably more true today as it was in the early 80’s, the first time it made me laugh).
Looking at you at the other side of the Atlantic: people were not so fat.
But seriously now: by almost all metrics, today is better. Although the End is logically Nigher.
It was also legal for women and teachers to physically and mentally abuse children in the name of discipline. If a child was injured, it was explained away with some perfectly normal excuse like “She fell off the sing” or “He rolled off the changing table” and this was not questioned. And in some places, it was also acceptable for strangers to “correct” a child as they saw fit.
And who would have thought that priests, or other adults in authority, would molest children? No way! The kids were totally making it all up.
Regarding healthcare, you get what you pay for. A stethoscope is cheaper than an MRI but not as effective, and sending you home to die, is cheaper than immunotherapy.
I wonder if one of the reason that people view the 50’s as so idyllic is due to the Motion picture code. When all you know of the 50’s is through the movies, you see a time when the police were always good, there was no drugs, no rape, no moral turpitude, and good always won over evil. Then in the 60s and 70s, things suddenly stopped being so wholesome, not because reality changed, but because films were allowed to show a more complete reality.
ETA: one advantage of now over a couple of years ago is that we can have a thread like this without it getting hijacked by a certain, not so dearly departed poster.
Uh, the very first fax machine was prototyped in 1843. By 1905 it was starting to be commercialized. Now it wasn’t until the 60s that a relatively simple machine was widely available but that had to do with the development of micro-electronics, not a new invention in fax machines.
And men directly never got raped or sexually assaulted.
I was a clumsy child. As in, you know, I’d hit myself against the furniture and the walls and the doorknobs often. Those of my teachers who back then took a look at me, heard my mother refer to me as “the girl” and knew I was an open target were fired with extreme prejudice as soon as my generation reached the PTA (one still remains, but watched like a hawk and someday I want to get the details of why the hell is that bitch still there). Recently some friends of my brother’s were mad that when they got pregnant with their fifth they were sent for an interview with Social Services: I got them off their high horse with descriptions and offers of introduction to the children of several large families I knew as a child… one of those families lost children on several occasions and never noticed, includes one sibling who discovered he’d had several broken bones during his military service’s medical examination…
Re: Faxes, I “entered the workforce” in 1989. There was a fax machine in the office, but it was far from a routine piece of equipment–I was expected to figure out how it worked. Faxes came out on that shitty thermo-paper which was often illegible and impossible to handle–one of my responsibilities was to copy the faxes onto “real paper.”
We had a Telex number, but no machine. I think we may have received or sent a Telex in my salad days, but such an exalted method of communication was above my pay grade.
Also, I was frequently sent on runs across town to get documents signed and returned. I loved it–in the pre internet, pre-smartphone era watching people on the subway was the highlight of my day.
Faxes were a brief and shitty interregnum between paper documents and e-docs. Nothing to be nostalgic over. Not better than today.
Agreed. Movies and TV also left out other unpleasant facts about life in the past. Children working 12-hour days in factories, workers losing limbs and being told “that’s life”, disease wiping out whole families, etc. A while back, I watched an episode of Daniel Boone, and marveled at all the people in frontier Kentucky with full sets of pearly white teeth.
Also, sanitation standards. TV is visual and auditory, but not olfactory.
Meh, I was born in the mid 50s, so really don’t remember too much from those remaining years of the decades.
The economy was booming, which allowed my parents and their siblings to save some money and buy their own homes - something their depression-era parents were unable to do. After WWII, there was a lot of pent-up demand after many decades of deprivation.
My parents were friends with a gay man and he used to come over here and there. He was a really nice guy. He moved away a little later, but he was still remembered fondly by my parents. I don’t think people were as bad as the narrative claims.
My uncle had a friend who was black and they were always doing things together. My uncle was the sort of person who would say “If you don’t want my friend, you don’t want me either”. They visited occasionally, but my uncle was a bit of a hermit, so when they visited, it really was an occasion. He was my mother’s brother and she would be absolutely delighted whenever they visited. They may have been in a gay relationship; I could never work out the dynamics in my young brain and really wasn’t concerned about it. My uncle died when I was 12 and his life had always been a bit of a mystery.
When my sister and I were young and my parents were driving us home from visiting our grandparents, we were bored and started to emulate a movie we saw and raised our hands and said “heil hitler”. My mother spun around in horror and said “Stop that! Do you want us to be arrested?!?!”
The remnants of McCarthyism loomed large. I see some similarities to today. Apparently, it is human nature
This narrative that people were
Sorry about the above. I hit Save too soon and it was messed up. Missed the edit window.
I would also add:
I remember duck and cover, even though I didn’t start school until the 60s. We had drills in schools - go to the hallway, crouch down and cover yourself with books or what have you, and stay away from glass. Or, duck under your desk. We also had fire drills. None of these things were traumatic.
We knew women who ran their own businesses and some who were well-compensated for managing small to mid-sized offices for others. It wasn’t the dark ages after all.
We were warned about bad people, techniques they might use to get our cooperation, and what to do if we encountered them. Yet, we played outside all day long and whined when we had to come in for lunch and dinner. As a result, we came into contact with lots of other people. No one was hovering over us constantly. We had to learn to negotiate with other people of all ages and types with little to no parental interference after a certain age, say 8-10 years or so. Sometimes it was successful, sometimes it failed miserably, but you learned a lot.
Finally, every decade is the pinnacle of what came before it. I wouldn’t want to go back, but people
back then weren’t as bad as everyone would like you to believe. I find that narrative to be wildly fantastical. It took that era to get to this one. It was just one of many eras that eventually led us here.
Fifty years from now, people will speculate, somewhat inaccurately, about today. They will assign a narrative to it and give that narrative a gospel-like acceptance. All narratives are unnuanced and not necessarily a reflection of typical life.
No, Mad Men was not a representation of most people’s lives in the 1950s (or any other time for that matter).
Have you seen any schools lately? They still have extensive bike racks, full of bikes.
And maybe you don’t know everyone on your block, but if so, that’s your own fault. If that’s something that you value, then go out and meet them. Actually, that’s a perfect illustration of the problem: Back when you were a kid, you didn’t have to personally go around meeting people, because your parents did it for you. But now, with a generation of baby boomers who never grew up, they don’t realize that being an adult doesn’t work like being a child, and so now, they need to do things like that themselves.
Some good things associated with the past:
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People were more likely to live closer to extended family, so there were stronger support systems. It was less expected that parents raise their kids completely on their own.
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Because information was less abundant, there was less living in fear and anxiety. The tradeoff of this obviously is that people were constantly endangering their lives (and the lives of their children). But if you were lucky enough not to be a victim of risk, it was probably nice not to have the psychological burden of worrying about threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities on a 24/7 basis.
You’ve made some very good points, XT. The 1950’s were not such a good decade. My family and I knew a few people who developed polio, due to not being vaccinated. They survived, but remained permanently paralyzed. Not good, at all. The music wasn’t that great, either. Many kids, especially boys, were forced to repeat a grade if they failed enough courses, and then there was the McCarthy period, where many people had their careers ruined just for openly differing in the overall political discourse.
In order for a man to be prosecuted for beating his wife, the police had to see him do it and the wife had to press charges. Very few did, for fear of retaliation. There were no battered woman shejters to help her.
Now, if there is any evidence of battering, the police arrest the batterer and the state presses charges.
One thing that was better in the 1950’s: Germ phobia was much less prevalent, and antivaxxers did not exist. People got sick, and got over it. And it improved their immune systems.
But then again, many of these communities that were stable and had strong support systems, with extended family living nearby were also quite hostile towards outsiders, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or color. That was not a good thing at all.
Not everybody who got sick got over it. People who developed polio, for example, often died, were permanently confined to an iron lung, or were permanently paralyzed.
I graduated from high school in 1984 and grade school in 1978 (to give you an idea of when I’m talking about) and my parents knew the other parents in the neighborhood because the kids were all roughly the same age. My parents are still in the same neighborhood (after almost fifty years) and they still know a very few of the neighbors, but because they no longer have children in school at the same time, know fewer people. (There’s also the fact that my parents are in their eighties and don’t socialize much, or spend much time outside or walking around.)
The 1960’s were cool in many ways; i. e. the music, many, if not most of the movies, and, in general, it was a very exuberant, exciting and sometimes risky time. It was a cool time to be a teenager, too. On the flip side of the 1960’s, however, cars weren’t as safe or as well made as they are nowadays. No airbags were implemented in cars, and just the regular seatbelt without the harness existed.
The Beatles made their debut here into the United States, and got a whole generation into a whole new kind of music. The Beatles were the best in the rock-n-roll department, although there were other good rock groups, as well.
As far as the 1960’s go, however, they had their darker side. There was a lot of personal meanness, and people who were clearly different in some way or other, got rather mean treatment. Girls and women were not encouraged to go into anything such as the Martial Arts and learn how to defend themselves physically, which was unfortunate.
Girls and women were not encouraged to be much of anything but get a job and live at home until you got a man and became a stay-at-home mom. The phrase “career girl” was a total misnomer: We were women and we held jobs, not careers.
As Gloria Steinman would later remark “We’ve become the men we wanted to marry.” Nowadays women don’t have to marry a doctor, they can be one.
OK, Jonas Salk made one of the above statements a lie.
[/QUOTE]
This:
[quote=“Magiver, post:51, topic:832947”]
The iron lung races were fun. We would switch them over to battery power and race them in the hospital hallways.
sure was a lie! Jonas Salk was absolutely right in that respect! If not for Jonas Salk, there would be people still dying or being permanently incapacitated by polio, and/or being confined to iron lungs. There’s no way that it would be good to go back to those days. The anti-vaxxers are a dangerous lot who couldn’t care less about the fact that by refusing to have their kids vaccinated against deadly but preventable diseases, they’re also putting their own kids, as well as other people’s kids, at risk.
The fact that a lot of people buy into Wakefield’s so-called “link” between vaccines and ASD, despite the fact that this vaccines-ASD “link” was debunked, disproved and tossed out by the wayside years ago is really horrific–and dangerously disgusting, to boot.
The fact that the British-born Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy prey on ignorant, suspicious people who are fearful of Autism Spectrum Disorder (which is what the anti-vaccine movement is based on), is a dangerous disgrace. Dr. Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine and his accreditation, due to the fact that his so-called “link” between vaccines and ASD was found to have been based on flawed and deliberately falsified data, and he deserved to. No sympathy for that guy from me!