Oh and I think we can’t really debate abortions in the past pre-Roe vs Wade for the simple reason that the only statistics you’d be able to find would be those caught having or providing abortions back then. I do remember reading (I’ll scrounge a source) that abortions are at their absolute lowest since RvW.
The Master speaks. Turns out, the 50s probably were safer, at least, than times since or previous. It was, after all, a time when social cohesion and conformity were highly valued. This has (as has been pointed out) both good and very bad results for society. How you feel about it depend on which factors have a greater percieved impact on your life.
Absolutely, totally false. Drug problems are nowhere NEAR as bad as they were a hundred years ago. 100 years ago, alcoholism was absolutely rampant - way, way worse than it is today. The people who wanted Prohibition, while misguided, weren’t just prudes; alcohol was absolutely tearing society apart. There were many times more alcoholics in 1903 than there are alcoholic AND drug abusers today, I’d argue.
Alcohol is absolutely, #1, far and away the most destructive drug in human history. It has killed and destroyed and impoverished more people than all the other drugs combined. And it was WAY worse 100 years ago in Western society than it is today.
Please keep in mind the reporting issues around illegitimate births, marriage and divorce. Complete, accurate and tracable record keeping on individuals is something rather new. Until fairly recently, a girl could be kept in the farmhouse for six months, deliver and present the world with a bouncing baby sister - and no one but the family doctor, who delivered at home, would be wiser - and he wasn’t necessarily going to tell. A women could get pregnant, leave town, and show up in the city forty miles away a “widow.” We have both these cases in my oral family history - the first from the 1920s, the second a WWII “widow.”
As to divorces, lax records - and records far away - likely made bigamy far more possible than it is today. Don’t like being married to your wife - abandon her. Skip town, show up a few hundred miles away and no one is likely to find you.
Today, we can track you pretty well from the moment you are born. Its hard to pass off a baby as the bio child of someone else - but that wasn’t that difficult to do fifty years ago - particularly in a rural community - both the stigma of illegitimacy and the stigma of adoption made sure these things were family secrets. Its hard to skip town on your wife and kids and not have someone show up to garnish your paycheck for child support - that was pretty easy to do even when I was growing up in the 1970s (one of my good friends has a “father” with at least twenty six children from at least eight different “wives” - many he married, some he bothered to divorce, none he paid child support for).
I understand that until recently in California, the state got their illegitamacy statistics from reviewing birth records and marking as “illigetimate” any birth where the parents last names didn’t match. Come to think of it, the State of Minnesota has no way to know whether my daughter is the result of a married union or not - there is no check box on her birth certificate indicating Mr. 'Rosa and I are married.
We never started an unprovoked war in Iraq, or anywhere else before.
Oh really? Try Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam and Cuba, for starters.
When I was growing up it was normal to beat children. I’m certain that many parents were able to restrain themselves to a swat on the bottom, but many parents took this tradition as a green light to actually abuse kids. That was commonplace. Heaven help you if you had a mentally unbalanced parent!
The founding fathers were fantastic people but still short-sighted. They really didn’t mean "with liberty and justice for all.. So right off the bat things were not better for well over half the population – women and non-whites.
Subtract from that group of white males the men who were so poor that they could not feed their families. It was immoral to tolerate that kind of suffering.
And those white males that remain were so often socially confined to role-playing – pretending to be what they were not.
There was nothing moral about that.
Because there were fewer divorces, children grew up in homes with unhappy parents. They witnessed a lot of spousal abuse in those days – verbal, emotional, physical. And it wasn’t always the man who was the perp.
There weren’t rape crisis centers or “safe places” for the abused to find shelter.
Maybe more people are in prison today because we have more reporting of crimes (spousal abuse, child abuse, rape), better investigative tools, mandated prison sentences, and too many personally intrusive laws for harmless “crimes.”
I’ve learned to tolerate a lot of violence in movies. It seems to be an outlet for men. If some of them want “explosions and naked chicks,” as one of my young friends says, that doesn’t bother me as long as they treat me respectfully.
I’m an oldster who thinks that kids are brighter and perhaps even kinder than they’ve ever been. I know that my grandchildren are certainly not as shallow as I was at their age. And they are better educated – just not in public schools.
The state of public education today is immoral. There are major coverups. The primary objective is to make things look good on paper.
An there is one Victorian tradition that I would like to see return. Queen Victoria used marijuana.
When comparing our current morals to the recent past, women’s rights and civil rights ARE THE ISSUE!!!
How can you possibly think otherwise???
I think the idea of a utopian society in our fictional past is shared by weak minded conservatives and liberals alike.
I’m a conservative and I have no such notions.
Some things in the past were better then they are now. IMHO, things have improved more than they have gotten worse. This, of course, is mostly due to advances in technology and science than anything else.
If people are fucking a little more now, but there is less STD’s anyway because of advances in medicine I consider that a good trade. Morality shmorality.
Hmmmmm, I’ve heard of some concern around 1888 in
the Whitechapel district of London.
There may have been a couple of books and a few movies
about this.
Hmmm, addressing the OP, and just my own opinion based on anecdotal evidence. To me anyway, slices of life always seem better in retrospect,you tend to froget the bad and compile a list of the good(probably half made up) unless you had a really terrible experience, like abuse in your home, it was cooler when you were a kid. Then, your teenage years became the great ones or if high school sucked, college can be wistfully remebered as the place you escaped the jockocricy, and 4 years of coming together with those of similar mind, perhaps meeting your future somebody, didnt have to worry about paying bills, or a colicky baby, or a completely fucking insane boss, oh… ah yeah, wistful remembrance, thats my WAG.
No it wasnt.
Certainly not where I lived, and I dont know anybody I grew up with who was beaten. In my family as far back as my grandfather can remember no one was more loved than our children. My family for generations has always treated children only with love. We dont beat children, we dont even hit children.
Beating of children is not a “tradition”, it is a sickness.
If your family, or if your culture, beat children then that is the way they were, but dont say other families were as bad as yours, they werent.
My father was illegitamate. When I was grown I was told about how my “aunt” got pregnant and after barely surviving a botched abortion came to live with my “grandmother” until she had the baby. My father found out about this when he was sixteen. This all happened in the 1940’s. My father spent his entire life wondering who he was. By the way my “aunt” died of cirrhosis of the liver. My father died drinking and driving.
Sex is a natural urge that we get due to hormones that start racing in our blood when we are teenagers. It will happen with or without the influence of popular culture. STD’s and pregnancy happen because of sex. There are many cites in the Bible about people having sex with or without the benifit of being married. (Too many sites to name)
Most people I have met do not consider ethel alcohol a drug. Many times I’ve witnessed people having a beer and discussing what a horrible thing cocaine is. These people generally would be quick to point out that they drink beer and seldom drink hard liquor, as if that makes a difference. I can’t give a specific cite but I believe that through the ages alcohol has ruined more lives than any of the other hard drugs. It’s just too simple to make and is so readily available. People have partaken of hard drink since the dawn of man.
As long as people have wanted what other people had, they have been violent to one and other. Alcohol and harmones have helped. Religion has made people violent towards one and other, too. Also, we have just bombed a country into submission for no other reason than to make them democratic like us.
And finally a cite: The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which will be done; and there is no new thing under the sun. Ecclisiastes 1:9
For anyone nostalgic about “the good old days”, I strongly recommend two books – Otto Bettmann’s The Good Old Days —THey were Terrible! and Richard Shenckman’s ** Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History** (alonh with the harder-to-finf follow-up volume, I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode or Not) Bettman is )was?) the founder of the Bettman archive, and he presents lots of pictures of 19th and early 20th century awfulness. You won’t complain about elevator inspection certificates after looking at the editorial cartoons about elevator deaths, or about dumping laws when you look at the pictures of garbage being pulled through bathing areas at Coney Island.
Shenkman has been criticized on these Boards for being a bad historian, but I’ve always seen him as a sort of historian counterpart to Jearl Walker’s “Flyinmg Circus of Physics” – you don’t go to his books for history, but for references to in-depth articles on topics. He has a whole chapter devoted to “the good old days”, and he points out that drug addiction, even aside from alcohol, was a severe social problem (and most drugs weren’t even outlawed until after 1900), that crime waves and complaints about lax sentencing are eternal, and that public schools usually didn’t seem much like Heinlein’s recollections of them. There’s a lot of documentation in his books, with plenty of cites.
Not to long ago, someone on this board (it may have been Polycarp) asserted the following (I’m paraphrasing from memory):
**Conservatives want to keep the good things of the past, and liberals want to get rid of the evil things of the past. These are not mutually exclusive goals, provided everybody agrees on what’s good and what’s evil. **
I think this is really profound, and germane to this political distinction mentioned in this thread. (Incidentally, if this wasn’t Polycarp, please correct me – I’d like to know who it was, and I’m too lazy to search).
There is also a general human tendency to revere the past. I think all of us (conservatives and liberals alike) would prefer that our origins are good, not evil. This is not a bad tendency, but it can lead to papering over the bad stuff that was around in the past.
Do conservatives do this more than liberals? My gut feeling is yes, for the reasons given in the bold-faced paragraph above. But since I can’t think of a way to prove this, and this is GD, I will stop short of asserting it.
I also think the tendency to paper over the bad stuff of the past is more common in cultural conservatives than libertarians. The latter may describe themselves as conservative, but many of their views on social issues would not be considered such by cultural conservatives.