Were They Really the Good Old Days?

I can't count the times I have heard that it used to be better in the 40's the 50's the 60's etc., that we used to have less government, we used to have less worries, and most of all people were some how more civilized. You could leave your door open and sell encyclopedias door to door.

Of course I didn't live in the 50's, but I can read. The 50's were a time of racial segregation, the Ku Klux Klan was everywhere spewing hatred, and segregation was the law until 1968. Can you imagine a world in which the color of your skin determines weather or not you can by a sandwich? Would you really want to live in that world? And the 40's, just look at the 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life" The hero of the story is deaf in one ear, why?, because his boss at a pharmacy when he was a child grabbed him by the ear and yanked it. Of course, nothing happens to the pharmacist in the story despite his proclivity for committing felony assault on children causing grievous bodily harm. I still can't understand how this could be let go, or written in to a supposedly "family oriented" story. The only explanation I can come up with is that 1946 was a time when this kind of behavior went unpunished or was looked upon with a wink and a nod. Remember this is felony assault, on a child. Only in a third world country could this kind of thing take place and be gotten clean away with.

It is important to note that a lot of the housing discrimination laws and sexual harassment laws did not exist back in the 50's and 60's. Women were harassed with impunity on the job and racial minorities were discriminated against in housing. Can you imagine what an interracial couple went through? For get about it if you happened to be gay back than. The closet was your whole universe, period.

And if you happened to have a little medical condition come up it's any ones guess what would happen. Certainly there were no organ transplants so if you happened to need a set of lungs or a heart you were pretty much toast. No SSRI's so if you suffered from depression you kept suffering from depression. Cancers that are curable now were a death sentence than.

As to electronics the 50's were certainly still full of vacuum tubes, and a computer weaker than a cheap hand calculator would fill a whole room. Now the search for knowledge is but a mouse click away but if you had a college paper to research than, you better like libraries because you would be spending a lot of time searching through books that your library probably wouldn't have in the first place. Projects that take hours today would take months than and the end result wouldn't measure up. I learned how a helicopter is flown in a few minutes on line but I can't imagine finding a book on helicopters in a library. You might get lucky but you would probably find your self sifting through 5 or so books on airplanes and hoping for a casual reference to helicopters

The bottom line is, the United States was not long ago a much less civilized place. Much less thought went into society and human relationships, sexism and racism flourished, and technology was much more primitive. In short, America had a 3rd world shade to it which has now faded. There was little going on back in the 50's 40's etc that could be called better. What we had was savagery not civilization the old morality was poorly thought out, discriminatory and barbaric. I like the world today much better than the world of my parents and I look forward to the world in the decades ahead.