"When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country" G. Gordon Liddy
Liddy is only a few years older than I and his book really hit home with me. If you're in your thirties or forties you really ought to read it. You will be shocked.
Posted on 06/11/2008 5:49:58 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Irrelevant. The HUGE increases in lifespan mostly show up in the teenage through middle-adult years (when lots of people died back then, but hardly anybody dies nowadays).
Depends on your definition of huge. Actually the largest difference shows up between birth and the late teens (what I call childhood, as I stated). Life expectancy at age 20 has gone from about 50 in 1950 to about 54 in 1995. Four years is not “huge” to me. So fewere infants and children are dying, but adults are not really living much longer.
Hokay. You won't mind doing my lawn, cleaning up the place, or otherwise being at my beck and call for the next four years, then...?
“Racial discrimination” wasn’t as bad as people these days make it out to be. People were better off with a stable society and racial discrimination than they are with an unstable society and racial equality.
Unfortunately, to advance the cause of racial equality our society accepted Marxist notions of advance. We all lost on that one.
On the other hand, when I was a kid there was only one telephone company, long distance was $7 per minute, and cell phones did not exist.
The internet was eight DoD computers connected by coax.
Computers were huge, fantastically-expensive room-sized installations that used magnetic tape for memory and were programmed using holes mechanically punched in cardboard. PCs did not exist.
Most homes were without air conditioning.
American cooking (both home and restaurant) was mostly bland, unhealthy crap made from pre-packaged, industrially-produced ingredients. Only hippies and hicks ate fresh foods.
There was no effective treatment for depression.
Automobiles were oversized, poorly engineered, and inefficient.
Air, water, and soil pollution was far worse than it is today.
Type was set with clunky, photosetting machines, or by hand using lead slugs.
A calculator cost over $300, in the money of the time.
I could go on, but I won’t. A lot of things were better back then... but a lot were worse than today as well.
"When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country" G. Gordon Liddy
Liddy is only a few years older than I and his book really hit home with me. If you're in your thirties or forties you really ought to read it. You will be shocked.
When I was a kid, self-serve gas was unheard of. You pulled into a gas station and the personnel not only filled the tank but checked the oil and cleaned the windshield.
For I don’t know, twenty cents a gallon maybe.
We still have this in New Jersey. By law.
There are many differences, good and bad, between the past and the present. Here are a few that should be considered:
What was bad in the past:
MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction, not the magazine, which was good, at least for a while). There was a continual, nagging fear that nuclear war could begin at any time.
Pollution was awful. SMOG was dangerous. Metallic lead was everywhere. Waterways were contaminated. Trash littered the highways.
Communism threatened to destroy the world. The Soviet Union defined evil and its sick philosophy ruled half the world. Its American proponents were clearly crazy, and utterly ruthless.
Middle America was incredibly boring. One of the reasons scouting and garage bands were so popular is because there was little else to do. The women’s movement started out of educated women living in agonizing boredom.
The first experiments in welfare statism began. LBJ’s Great Society did help to bust up some of the more grinding poverty in rural America, but it was a disaster in the urban areas.
The Vietnam War became intolerable because of the micromanagement of its conduct by politicians, a completely unfair military draft, the lying propaganda of the MSM, as well as the left-wing takeover of academia.
I might also add that the food back then was not particularly distinct, pleasant, or healthy. Health care was a lot more primitive. Most adults smoke and drank too much liquor. Entertainment for adults was the 3 network broadcast TV, theater movies, and bars.
Oh yes. Hippies STANK. It was a badge of honor for them to smell like a cesspit and be utterly filthy. At least the old hippies today know how to bathe every now and then.
Kids today need to be informed of their constitutional rights and be encouraged to fight for them in the future.
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