Posted on 04/06/2016 9:00:44 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Is America a better place today than it was back in 1956? Of course many Americans living right now couldn’t even imagine a world without cell phones, Facebook or cable television, but was life really so bad back then? 60 years ago, families would actually spend time on their front porches and people would actually have dinner with their neighbors. 60 years ago, cars were still cars, football was still football and it still meant something to be an American. In our country today, it is considered odd to greet someone as they are walking down the street, and if someone tries to be helpful it is usually because they want something from you. But things were very different in the middle of the last century. Men aspired to be gentlemen and women aspired to be ladies, and nobody had ever heard of “bling”, “sexting” or “twerking”. Of course life was far from perfect, but people actually had standards and they tried to live up to them.
So how did it all go so wrong?
Could it be possible that life in America peaked back then and we have been in decline ever since?
Before you answer, I want to share with you a list of comparisons between life in America in 1956 and life in America in 2016…
In 1956, John Wayne, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe were some of the biggest stars in the entertainment world.
In 2016, our young people look up to “stars” like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga.
In 1956, Americans were watching I Love Lucy and The Ed Sullivan Show on television.
In 2016, the major television networks are offering us trashy shows such as Mistresses and Lucifer.
In 1956, you could buy a first-class stamp for just 3 cents.
In 2016, a first-class stamp will cost you 49 cents.
In 1956, gum chewing and talking in class were some of the major disciplinary problems in our schools.
In 2016, many of our public schools have been equipped with metal detectors because violence has gotten so far out of control.
In 1956, children went outside and played when they got home from school.
In 2016, our parks and our playgrounds are virtually empty and we have the highest childhood obesity rate on the entire planet.
In 1956, if a kid skinned his knee he was patched up and sent back outside to play.
In 2016, if a kid skins his knee he is likely to be shipped off to the emergency room.
In 1956, “introducing solids” to a baby’s diet may have meant shoving a piece of pizza down her throat.
In 2016, we have “attachment parenting” which advocates treating children like babies almost until they reach puberty.
In 1956, seat belts and bicycle helmets were considered to be optional pieces of equipment, and car safety seats were virtually unknown.
In 2016, millions of us are afraid to leave our homes for fear that something might happen to us, and if something does happen we slap lawsuits on one another at the drop of a hat.
In 1956, many Americans regularly left their cars and the front doors of their homes unlocked.
In 2016, many Americans live with steel bars on their windows and gun sales are at all-time record highs.
In 1956, about 5 percent of all babies in America were born to unmarried parents.
In 2016, more than 40 percent of all babies in America will be born to unmarried parents.
In 1956, one income could support an entire middle class family.
In 2016, approximately one-third of all Americans don’t make enough money to even cover the basics even though both parents have entered the workforce in most households.
In 1956, redistribution of wealth was considered to be something that “the communists” did.
In 2016, the federal government systematically redistributes our wealth, and two communists are fighting for the Democratic nomination.
In 1956, there were about 2 million people living in Detroit and it was one of the greatest cities on Earth.
In 2016, there are only about 688,000 people living in Detroit and it has become a joke to the rest of the world.
In 1956, millions of Americans dreamed of moving out to sunny California.
In 2016, millions of Americans are moving out of California and never plan to go back.
In 1956, television networks would not even show husbands and wives in bed together.
In 2016, there is so much demand for pornography that there are more than 4 million adult websites on the Internet, and they get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.
In 1956, the American people had a great love for the U.S. Constitution.
In 2016, “constitutionalists” are considered to be potential terrorists by the U.S. government.
In 1956, people from all over the world wanted to come to the United States to pursue “the American Dream”.
In 2016, 48 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 believe that “the American Dream is dead”.
In 1956, the United States loaned more money to the rest of the world than anybody else.
In 2016, the United States owes more money to the rest of the world than anybody else.
And there is one more thing that I would like to share with you before I wrap up this article.
This is what the New York skyline looked like on March 31st, 1956…
And this is the kind of thing that we are seeing displayed on the Empire State Building these days…
For those that don’t know, that is an image of the Hindu goddess of death, time and destruction known as Kali. And next month a reproduction of the 48-foot-tall arch that stood in front of the Temple of Baal in Palmyra, Syria is going up in Times Square.
So now that you have seen what I have to share, what do you think?
Has America changed for the better, or has it changed for the worse?
The difference is that we celebrate the depravity in 2016
Wow! Speaking of fender skirts that model has them front and rear. I am surprised the front wheels could turn.
It probably did happen then. We just didn’t hear about it as much. In this internet world with 3 24/7 “news” network there’s no longer any such thing as local news, everything is national is enough people share it on Facebook. So in the 50s if some park in Philadelphia was over run with perverts people in Chicago and LA would probably never hear about it, now we will. Remember the first production of West Side Story was in 1957, so anybody thinking that era lacked things like youth violence and sex needs to explain how a 1950s audience could even understand a Broadway musical about these thing (well OK it was the 50s so they just kissed). I just saw a story saying Kitty Genovese’s killer died, that was 1964, not long after this article’s supposed golden era, populated by largely the same people, who did nothing.
The 1950s had serial killers and rapists and perverts just like any other time in human history, it just didn’t have a media that splashed that kind of stuff in your face 24/7.
New Jersey
OH MY! We had the two door model and I always remember it as ugly bright yellow. Kids always used to tease me about riding around in a yellow bathtub.
I do not agree with this whatsoever. The rest of the point about over-attentive parents is well taken, and it is because people use birth control and abortion now and have so many fewer children. They treat each individual child like a hothouse flower because they don't have any others, and no depth of childrearing experience, as a result of "planning."
It’s almost like they voluntarily adopted Red China’s one child rule.
I can maybe see that argument working for things like child abduction, as in we have always had that but now get whipped into froth about it by the media. But I don’t buy that for the public parks and rest stops being bastions of male homo hook ups. Sure, it probably happened at lot more than we think it did back then, but not on the scale it does now, right?
I don’t think it would be tolerated back then, even if news of it never got out of the locality. The folks who go clean up don’t even condemn the behavior, or at least they didn’t in the articles I have seen about it. It was more like they blamed society for making gay men hide their love, which completely misses the point of sure, free anonymous sex in a neutral locality.
Freegards
Well the myth is that 38 neighbors heard her being raped and murdered and did nothing, but they were unfairly maligned. What actually happened is somewhat different.
"Genovese had driven home from her job early in the morning of March 13, 1964. Arriving home around 3:15 a.m., she parked in the Long Island Rail Road parking lot about 100 feet from her apartment's door, located in an alleyway at the rear of the building. As she walked toward the building, Moseley approached her. Frightened, Genovese began to run across the parking lot and toward the front of her building. Moseley ran after her, quickly overtook her, and stabbed her twice in the back.
Genovese screamed, "Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!" Several neighbors heard her cry but, on a cold night with the windows closed, only a few of them recognized the sound as a cry for help. When Robert Mozer, one of the neighbors, shouted at the attacker "Let that girl alone!" Moseley ran away and Genovese slowly made her way toward the rear entrance of her apartment building. She was seriously injured, but now out of view of any witnesses.
Records of the earliest calls to police are unclear and were not given a high priority by the police. One witness said his father called police after the initial attack and reported that a woman was "beat up, but got up and was staggering around".
Other witnesses observed Moseley enter his car and drive away, only to return ten minutes later. In his car, he changed to a wide-brimmed hat to shadow his face. He systematically searched the parking lot, train station, and an apartment complex. Eventually, he found Genovese, who was lying, barely conscious, in a hallway at the back of the building where a locked doorway had prevented her from entering the building. Out of view of the street and of those who may have heard or seen any sign of the original attack, Moseley stabbed Genovese several more times. Knife wounds in her hands suggested that she attempted to defend herself from him.
While Genovese lay dying, Moseley raped her. He stole about $49 from her and left her in the hallway. The attacks spanned approximately half an hour. Afterwards, "Genovese, still alive, lay in the arms of a neighbor named Sophia Farrar, who had courageously left her apartment to go to the crime scene, even though she had no way of knowing that [Moseley] had fled"
Kitty Genovese. her murderer Walter Moseley
In 1956 the top marginal federal tax rate on regular income was 91%. In 2016 it is 39.6%.
Well there wasn’t a highway yet to have rest stops, at least not the kind we have now. But anonymous sex hookup locations have existed as long as we’ve had sexual mores, as soon as society said “these two people shouldn’t have sex” those two people started finding places to have sex. But again the big difference now is more info is flowing. Back then if you wanted to do the anonymous sex thing you had to started asking questions of the right kind of person, and have them trust you. Now you can google it. Look up the history of photography clubs and you’ll get a good idea of just how much seedy underbelly we had in the 50s.
No one paid anywhere near 91%.....the rich had write-offs galore.
Would you be in favor of returning to the 1956 income tax structure? The brackets would have to be adjusted for inflation, naturally, but say the rates were the same. Do you think that would be an improvement over what we have now?
Lower the rates, the better, just pointing out that no one paid 91% back in the day.
They don’t own and operate. That’s the way it used to be with roads in the USA for the most part, save in the case of shunpikes and municipal ownership. At the turn of the century, states suddenly started assuming ownership of road networks; one can surmise easily what influenced that.
And it’s also not constitutional to give this to the executive branch to be involved in (the FHWA is a division of the USDOT; note that the executive branch is steadily given more and more power from the start of the twentieth century onwards). The closest thing to any federal involvement is the Postal Clause, which gives Congress the power to create “post roads”, not the executive. The problem is that it is just about exactly the same as how socialistic countries built their highways; their level of control over their own societies is a matter of record, and doing the same here has produced a lot of the same outcomes.
“But anonymous sex hookup locations have existed as long as we’ve had sexual mores, as soon as society said “these two people shouldn’t have sex” those two people started finding places to have sex. But again the big difference now is more info is flowing.”
So if everything was suddenly transferred to 1955, just that every one knows what is happening because of the piles of condoms, nothing would be any different? I don’t buy it. But I could be wrong, I suppose.
Freegards
Well there probably wouldn’t be as big a pile, as the information would flow slower, and fewer people would know about the “hot spot”. But these things still happened. One of the elementary schools I went too had a series of concrete (unused) sewer tunnels in our playground (you’ve probably seen similar, connected with boards, nobody ever admits their sewer tunnels of course, they usually get called “tubes”) and a couple of times a year we’d head out to play and find “evidence” and have to go get a monitor. And elementary school I went to had an empty lot next door with a lot of wild vegetation that was frequently “decorated” with undergarments. This was in the late 70s. Hookup spots have existed forever. And remember condoms weren’t as popular back then (the diseases weren’t as vicious either) so there was less evidence to leave behind. But there’s always been the freak community, some eras they put more effort into hiding than others, but they’re always out there looking for their thing... and finding it.
You’re talking the late 70s. The 1970s and beyond are the spawn of the cultural revolution that we lived through in the 60s. The 50s were another world.
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