Were the any ways in which "the olden days" were better than today?

In My Humble Opinion
161

I don’t think that’s it at all; there’s been a long-term (since the 1970s at least) decrease in civic engagement in the US, and not knowing everyone on your block is part of that.

My guess is that TV is one of the big reasons for it- prior to TV, what else did you have to do after you were done with work? Read, listen to the radio, get it on with your spouse, or go out and do something with other people is about it. And I suspect that the most entertaining one was going out and doing stuff- bowling, drinking, being part of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes, etc… were where it was at in that era.

But TV is very engaging- to the point where people will stay in and watch TV over all the effort to go do something like that, especially when work hours and commutes are longer.

And Dewey Finn is right too- when the kids were engaged in the neighborhood, so were their parents, even when they might not otherwise have socialized with each other. I know I saw that in my childhood- there was a “neighborhood” where everyone’s parents more or less knew each other, because we all played on the same sports teams, went to the same school, were in the same scout troops, etc… And for a few of us, we all lived on the same street. So for example, my parents were sort of dragged into being part of this, despite being somewhat more intellectual than the rest of my friends’ parents. (we were the only family with multiple bookshelves in our home, while friends’ parents had large and prominent gun cabinets and hunting trophies on their walls)

162

Yesbut, way too many kids are driven 2 blocks to school. My Mom didnt even drive, we were a one car family.

We are close friends with one set of neighbors, and know quite a few.

163

The first part of this is not true. The second would be true unless it moved into a felony.

As I posted before “in some states " that wives charging husbands with criminal assault and battery must suffer more injuries than commonly needed for charges of battery" so a few slaps wouldn’t bring the cops but if you sent your wife to the hospital you certainly could be arrested.”

164

In the 50’s the difference between the rich and the middle class was smaller. From the Economic Policy Institute:

*The 2017 CEO-to-worker compensation ratio of 312-to-1 was far greater than the 20-to-1 ratio in 1965 and more than five times greater than the 58-to-1 ratio in 1989 (although it was lower than the peak ratio of 344-to-1, reached in 2000).
*
Large swaths of the middle class “feel” that they are being left behind and that their children cannot compete in education or enrichment activities with the children of the rich, because they are right. I went to a very competitive college in the early seventies, graduated with some awards and honors, and am not sure I could get admitted today.

It is so much harder to compete at anything now because the children of the rich have many advantages and also because those left behind are competing with the whole world instead of just “folks like them.”

Bruce Springsteen warned us all 34 years ago - "Foreman said these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back."

Paul Simon had something to say about it even earlier -

"In my little town
I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all
And he used to lean upon me
As I pledged allegiance to the wall
Lord I recall my little town
Coming home after school
Riding my bike past the gates of the factories
My mom doing the laundry
Hanging out shirts in the dirty breeze
And after it rains there’s a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It’s not that the colors aren’t there
It’s just imagination they lack
Everything’s the same back in my little town"

In the 50’s it was easier to be in the middle of the pack without feeling like you were losing ground. Today, the middle of the pack is not a promising place to be.

But, that does not mean that it was better.

165

mplo @160: “…confined to iron lungs…”

Hey! We prefer “iron lung users!”

Do you how long it takes to tap these posts out with a pencil clenched in my teeth?

166

I live across the street from an elementary school and lots of kids walk still. Too many get driven. I suspect some of the driving parents are on their way to work, and so dropping the kid off is natural.

167

As far as I can see back in the 1950’s we only had vaccinations for around 5-6 diseases.People would allow their kids to get mumps, measles, and chicken pox. As for polio, as I understand it many diseases mimic the symptoms of polio so many were misdiagnosed. Wheelchair bound FDR for example, did not have polio.He did however, push the March of Dimes to raise money for it.

168

Add to that, athletes. They werent paid nearly as much back then and many had to hold down off season jobs. Thats why it was so cheap to get into pro games.

169

Cheaper tickets to sporting events must have been nice, but athlete salaries have nothing to do with ticket prices.

170

He was believed for many years to have had it, although an unspecified viral illness followed by Guillain-Barre syndrome is probably more likely. (Lou Gehrig may not have had ALS, either, but since his body was cremated, there’s no way to test for it now.)

I grew up with several families who had kids who were disabled by prenatal rubella, mostly deaf. That doesn’t have to happen now.

Unfortunately, knowing your neighbors can backfire. My mother has always kept track of the neighbors’ comings and goings, and even made decisions for our family when I was a kid based on how the neighbors might react. :rolleyes: I don’t really think any of them would have cared, really. We’re talking about how she would throw a fit if she saw anyone carrying anything into the house other than groceries, getting into a car at mealtime, etc. like it affected her in any way.

171

Those don’t even make a little sense. Like,“Don’t ever go outside with an untucked shirt” would be excessive, but I could see where she was enforcing some sense of propriety. What was the “logic” behind the examples you gave?

172

Of course it did. You can’t pay athletes millions of dollars a year and still charge $10 for the most expensive ticket like the minor leagues , where the average salary for triple A is around $10,000 a month during the season - which is only 5 months long. If they cut MLB salaries in half, the teams wouldn’t lower the prices- but that doesn’t mean the salaries had nothing to do with ticket prices getting to their current level.

173

The definition of “better” definitely depends on who you were, or where you were, or what the situation was. Also the definition of “better”.

Statistically most of us are better off in modern times, but people aren’t statistics.

Digital communications have made me a lot wealthier than I would have been in earlier times. But I feel like there was less anxiety when many of us were simply off the grid for large chunks of the day, except for a landline (if that), and we accepted that matters we couldn’t touch would simply have to work themselves out until we were able to intervene.

Now I can’t have a peaceful cup of coffee at 5am without some damn thing in India needing my attention. It can wait until later but I can’t enjoy my coffee knowing it’s out there.

174

Ticket sales are one revenue stream of many for a sports team. Ticket prices are as high as any given market will bear.

175

On the global warming front I’d say drizzle, and long periods of steady rain. Many parts of the world are drying up and they are places that used to get days upon days of steady rain or drizzle, now it’s just flash floods that last no time and then go another long period without rain this does not help water levels.

176

My back didn’t hurt? I was a lot cuter? :wink:

Seriously, I will say, I do miss the 90s, although that’s probably just your typical nostalgia talking.

As far as “olden days in general”? Fashion. I am a HUGE vintage fashion addict. Ask anyone here. :wink:

177

Low interest loans for college
Most of Europe was in ruins and Asia’s economy had not taken off yet (not good for them, obviously) so the US economy was booming due to lack of competition.
No reality TV (then again, the idiot box earned that name for a reason, so maybe not as big an advantage as that sounds).

178

Some places (in New York, at least) are still like that. The neighborhood where my mom lived changed a whole lot from when I grew up in that house. But her neighbors would bring her her mail, would shovel her driveway and walk without being asked, would bring her food. When I moved in to take care of her, they continued to do some of that (but it mostly became my responsibility), but the kids would offer to pitch in to help if they saw me, for example, shoveling the driveway or raking. Neighbors would stop by to ask about my mom. They’d tell me how much they missed my dad (who used to take walks around the neighborhood and knew everyone, until he couldn’t do that anymore). One neighbor continued to deliver food to me after my mom went into the nursing home. After my mom died, she even drove all the way to my new apartment to deliver some food that she had cooked – no joke. And this was up to only a year or two ago. So yeah, it’s not common, but there really are places like that still.

179

I was born in 1951. White kid, middle class, female, semirural.

We weren’t nearly as afraid of being kidnapped, or molested, or drinking the water straight out of the creek as long as it was running clear. Maybe we should have been, but we weren’t.

We were, however, a whole lot more afraid of nuclear war. (Maybe we should be now, but mostly we aren’t.)

Little kids, and to some extent older ones, were a lot more likely to have significant unsupervised and unformatted time. Not everybody thinks that’s better, but overall I do. You could find out what was in your head without somebody telling you all the time what ought to be in there.

A lot of the environmental damage that’s happened over the last seventy years hadn’t happened yet. Some things have been cleaned up; but additional damage has been done.

Political and social discourse was a lot less fragmented. This had its disadvantages; but at least, if something was on TV and in the newspapers, there weren’t going to be lots of people arguing that it hadn’t happened at all.

It seems to me, in recollection, that people were a lot more relaxed. Time off was time off. Your boss wasn’t going to call you during off hours unless you had an unusual sort of job. Nobody – other than maybe your four year old or your cat – was expecting you to be continuously accessible. People could be out of touch for hours, or even days, and nobody would be upset about it. That had its downsides, of course; but it had its upsides too.

(Years later, in the late 1970’s, I broke up with my boyfriend on a trip across the country. I got in my car and drove off (I didn’t leave him by the side of the road, he was staying with his friends and it was his idea). Nobody for a thousand miles knew who I was. Nobody who knew me knew within a thousand miles where I was. Nobody at all but me knew what I was doing. It was terrifying; I was shaking. And it was also a huge thrill of power through me that I can feel to this day; I was shaking with joy. Nobody in the current society ever gets to feel that.)

One person, with an average sort of job, could often support a family. That’s a big one.

We were on the absolute cutting edge of great technology – and we weren’t, mostly, full of doubts about it. We had all sorts of things nobody had ever had before. An utterly ordinary house might have not only indoor plumbing and electric lights, but also a washing machine, a home freezer, electric or gas heat and cookstove – no more stoking the coal or the firewood!–, telephone, television. You could watch right now things happening on the other side of the continent, the same day! You could call up your uncle who’d moved to Italy and hear his voice, real time, on the phone! You could get an injection and wow, you wouldn’t get polio! You could take penicillin and your infection went away!

Not all that stuff was brand new, but some of it was, and just about all of it was new as something in common use during the lives of our parents. And we expected it to keep getting better. We hadn’t discovered antibiotic-resistant diseases yet – we expected disease to just be gone, soon. We hadn’t discovered the downsides of some of that tech. We thought soon everything would be atomic powered, including cars and houses. Work hours were supposed to keep getting shorter (and the jobs were expected to still pay just as well.) We expected our lives to just keep on getting better.
I don’t get the impression that many people think that, now.

– but, having said that, I remember again that we also expected the world to end in nuclear fire, any moment. The Red Queen’s got nothing on humans; just about all of us can simultaneously believe contradictory things before breakfast, after breakfast, and at two in the morning while sound asleep.

180

Ways in which it was better than today…?
Jobs were easy to come by and to keep.

Decent Houses cost two years salary.

You could go camping with your kids without some scumbag trying to brainwash your kid into becoming Marine Cannon-Fodder.

Employee loyalty was rewarded by a LOT more than some shitty gift-card.

Company holiday Parties & picnics. They were not just some “expense” but a celebration of camaraderie and of a job well done.

Company Coffee. It wasn’t just a ‘bene’… it was a valued tool provided by the company to get a fraction of a percent of more productivity out of the team.

Employees didn’t steal… not from the company and especially not from each other. Fired on the Spot before they even had the chance to shit out the lunch they stole and ate.

Company Cliches. They got addressed and reassigned… or fired until broken up. Screw gender… fired until broken up.

When restaurants went out of business, they weren’t replaced by “Reloading Supply” stores or “Schmeisers R Us”. Also, to you could drive 10 straight miles on a highway without seeing a Range or an America’s Armed Camp store.

When neighbors had better things to do than to circle the block harassing other neighbors just for some shit-bit of video they could upload on YouTube for a buck.

When using long-range lenses to spy through your neighbors windows was called “Pie Hawking” or being a “Peeping Tom” instead of being some ‘normal neighbor exercising their rights’.

When RICO was used against ALL organized crime groups, without any ‘exemptions’.

When foreign countries Owed us respect but didn’t OWN our respect.

When we valued our Allies more than some Manhattan Real Estate buck.

When we were sure that our leaders Knew our country’s enemies, instead of Blew our country’s enemies.

When there was integrity in government with real consequences for officials when there was not.

When Presidents were out waving and kissing babies instead of out fucking porn-stars and whores.

When protests meant something and weren’t laughed off by “Entertainment Media”.

When BOTH parties understood that Treason was unacceptable.

When the FBI was Praised for investigating and infiltrating Alt-Right groups like The Klan.

When emigration and immigration were considered signs of greatness and success instead of shitty excuses for Racism.

When the passing of a President’s life would have made America stop and cry.

When children in cages and human trafficking (slavery) were issues issues we fought against in the UN.

When being a veteran wasn’t some special class because every family had 3-4 members who were.

When the Law was the Law, not just some inconvenient suggestion.

When Subpoenas were Obeyed, because the Constitution wasn’t just Charmin.

When NONE of our media channels were lying arms of propaganda.

When attacks by Russia against America were retaliated against.

When our politicians knew right from wrong… and the people who voted knew right from wrong also.