Pot was around back in 1959, but someone from that era would be gobsmacked to learn that its use is so widespread now, and many people view it as no big deal.
Eating dinner at a restaurant used to be a much bigger deal, and much rarer, according to my elderly relatives.
Music genres like metal, punk, rap, etc would be surprising, if not shocking.
Massachusetts opted to allow liquor stores to open on Sundays a few years ago under the Governor Mitt Romney (a Mormon oddly enough). The most staunch opposition was from the liquor stores themselves. They liked having a free day off legally and not having to run a 7 day a week operation and worrying about what the competition would do.
The size of Americans. I wasn’t born until the early 60s, but there weren’t as many big people back then.
Terrorism on American soil. The time traveler would be astonished at Oklahoma City and 9/11 (of course, so were the people alive during the two events).
Big-time environmentalism. Back then nobody was aware of the damage they were doing to the environoment–big cars, no recycling, water and air pollution. The best thing to come out of the 1960’s was the awareness of what we were doing to the planet.
There are still lots of people around who actually lived in the '50s. I was eight years old in 1960. I’m pretty sure I’d make the transition pretty quickly and without a lot of trouble. A non-white or a gay would find it a lot more problematic.
I’d love having ten cent comic books and five cent candy bars again. But I’d sure miss PCs and the Internet, and having a huge selection of films and TV shows to watch any time I wanted practically at my fingertips. Of course, I’d get to see the Beatles make their American debut again, this time with real appreciation of what I was seeing. Lord, wouldn’t that be fabulous!
Jazz was very popular throughout most of the early 20th century. Jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were well-known and were often featured on Voice of America broadcasts, not to mention American radio and TV broadcasts. It’s not as though whites had little awareness of black musicians or black culture.
Lol.
I’d love to just show the 1959 my iPod. Because not only does it have a lot of music on demand in it, I can watch movies and TV shows on it. I think they’d be fairly amazed by that.
I wouldn’t even know where to find other gay people in 1959. Oh, it wouldn’t be too hard in cities like NYC or SF, but other than those I’d be totally lost. Sure, there would be places to go to have sex, but there was nothing like a “gay community” back then.
I think we’re actually talking about two different kinds of “surprises” here.
The first type are things that had already been imagined in 1959–or things that would at least be imaginable. They might be amazed to see an iPod, but it’s not like the idea of a really small, really portable record player and TV would be totally alien to them. If you had told the 1959 person that 50 years in the future, many many people would own such a thing, they probably would have believed you. After all, the iPod is just another step in a process of development that was already occurring.
The second type of surprises are things that the 1959 person would never have even thought of and would have trouble believing were really possible. I think PCs and the internet would fall into this category. So would certain social changes.
I guess the first type of surprise is stuff that would be amazing to them. The second type would be truly shocking.
“Please show me a widely used, inexpensive device used that will astonish me in as many ways as a laptop computer would have astonished a patent officer in Bern in 1905. At least some of the purposes of by this device should be as comprehensible to me as most of the uses of a laptop would have been to the young Einstein.”
-N. David Mermin, “What I’d Like to Know about 2105” (Warning: PDF)
I am from 1959, and I would not be amazed, I would feel sorry for you and your IPOD.
I would feel sorry for you because you have to watch such a small IPOD screen with such poor tiny speakers.
My tv in 1959 had a much bigger cathode ray picture tube. 19 inches. I also had some really great, and loud, speakers on my Hi-Fi. Additionally, the tv shows in 1959 were much better than the tv shows you have.
(I cant wait until Friday to watch the next brand new Rod Sterling Twilight Zone…and Elvis is coming out with a brand new record next week)
Nice! How did you manage to carry it around with you, by the way?
Just wanted to comment on the post/sig line synchronicity. Carry on.
[Of course, I used to think it said “No Golf, No Masters”…]
Well, it depends on the state. We were driving from L.A. to Phoenix.
My brother said, “This truck stop is in Arizona.”
I said, “The sign is still up the road, we’re not there yet.”
“Yes we are, I can smell it.”
“You can’t smell a state.”
But he was right. I hadn’t smelled smoking in a restaurant in over 10 years, but that was it. People were smoking in the eating area.
It’s not even close to being in the top 100. The U.S. is, however, the second-fastest growing country in North America. That might be cause for alarm… but seriously, if you exclude immigration, the population is barely growing at all.
The U.S. may consume too many resources, but there’s no question it could hold a lot more people. Are you going to tell me that Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana are overcrowded?
But back to the OP: tolerance for people of different races and sexualities might be surprising, and it’s kind of a given that changes in manners would be a surprise. But one kind of tolerance hasn’t been remarked on, and that’s our tolerance for mental illness. You see public service announcements about suicide and depression, and very large numbers of people are on antidepressants or in therapy, or both, and for a lot of people, that’s not seen as a big deal.
A person from 1959 might be very surprised about our health. Most people are on at least one prescription drug for something, if not several. It’s not even something you blink at these days. They might be surprised that most of us, including a lot of children, are overweight, and more and more people are developing diabetes as a result. Again, they might be surprised to see that affecting kids. We’re much more successful at treating things like heart diseases and cancer, but a lot of those things haven’t been cured in a significant way.
Did nobody mention that we buy bottled water now? They might be surprised that became fashionable. A lot of other ‘little’ extravagances might be a shock.
And I think they would definitely be surprised about inflation. I think that applies most to how much money we spend on entertainment and food. People today are staggered by the salaries athletes and CEOs and so on - if you came to 2009 straight from 1959 that would be a lot worse.
Some of them might be pleasantly surprised that fluoridation wasn’t a Communist plot, and did a lot of good for kids’ teeth.
I don’t know what the price of milk actually was in 1959, but i do know that milk, butter, and eggs are VASTLY cheaper today than they were then (not on a literal dollarl basis, necessarily, but adjusted for inflation).
Chicken, also, is much cheaper. No cite, unfortunately.
That is all true and there isn’t much need for a cite. It is a vast difference. The term “I have to put food on the table” was used literally in much earlier decades although almost no one was starving in 1959 in the U.S. either. Food is a bill like any other now and everyone can get enough calories to live even if it is still crap nutrition. That creates other problems but that is a separate discussion.
The entire food industry, especially the higher and more diverse end has expanded incredibly since the 1980’s let alone 1959. Basic staples like milk, bread, and eggs are very cheap these days when adjusted for inflation. People used to pay uniformed milk delivery men to drive from house to house to deliver fresh milk and that was considered a good and efficient service. Now, you can you just go into any convenience store and pick up the same thing with the morning paper (which is also about to die incidentally) for very little money. People pay a whole lot more for a single Weight Watchers microwavable lunch than they do for milk for their entire family. Eggs are even cheaper than milk.
If only.
If only I would have known that someday in the future, people would be stupid enough to pay $1 for a bottle of water, then, somehow, I would have cornered the market and become a multi-billionaire.
No sane person in 1959 in the United States would have paid a $1 for a bottle of water. I dont even remember anybody trying to do that. IF you told me that in 20 or 50 years people would pay money for water, you would be accused of being in the Twilight Zone.
Well, I dunno. If a bottle of water were available then for the same price as a Coke, which it more-or-less is now, I could see people buying it, even 50 years ago. I drink a lot of water, and when I’m away from home or work, it’s nice to be able to pop in to the corner market for a bottle.
Joe
Nope.
I never saw anybody buy any water other than a few stores selling gallon jugs of distilled water only for car batteries and irons.
I never saw anybody drink a bottle of water, because nobody sold bottles of water.
That is the point, nobody bought water back then, nobody even thought of selling water in a bottle for people to drink. I could have made a killing back then an I would have been the only person in the world to sell water by the bottle/glass for money, and I would be a filthy rich world wide monopoly if only we could have gotten people from the 1950’s to pay for a glass/bottle of water.