He left out a very important part of the 1930 - 1979 time period. Everybody was bored to tears.
Back in the ‘30’s, especially in the Southland, about the only entertainment people had were tent revivals. Some have gone so far as to blame lynchings on sheer boredom.
By the 1950s, and the great suburban western expansion, social tension had about reached a boiling point. While the end of the war pretty much ended omnipresent segregation in the North, much of the “Bible Belt” was still ruled by small town religious cliques that mistreated those outside of their sect.
The “sexual revolution” was actually a “cultural revolution” by people sick to death of their defined roles in society and wanting something better for themselves and their children.
The first big breakthrough gets little credit but had a huge impact: Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. For once, people could “vote with their feet”, and they did.
The in the 1960s, the light dawned that industrialism had made much of America a polluted mess. This is when cleaning up, both nationally and personally, suddenly became important.
The 1950s diet of meat, flour, sugar, salt, fat, liquor and cigarettes was really taking its toll.
But the giant breakthrough came with the breakup of AT&T: entertainment! Finally we had information we didn’t have to wait for, and was filtered through the big three TV nets and the local paper, days or weeks after it happened.
“Dad, why is polar bears fur white?”
“Gee, son. I don’t know. Why don’t you go to the library, find and read a book about polar bears, and find out? It should only take a day or two.”
“No thanks, dad. I’ll just Google it.”
“He left out a very important part of the 1930 - 1979 time period. Everybody was bored to tears.”
Boredom = Lack of imagination
Your critique of days gone by smacks of a progressive’s rant against the era when the going was better!
If you lived in the south and could only find entertainment in tent meetings and believe that the boredom without the electronic doo-dads people use to watch R and X rated movies and what passes for tele-programming then you’ve missed something.
Another electronic doo-dad that gives the sexual revolution feminists great pleasure is the vibrating penis. It helps them over today’s hump of not marrying and being a wife and mother.
I don’t believe you were a child of those decades past, however. If you were you wouldn’t be tossing stones on someone else’s nostalgic parade.
That's not a 1950s diet. It's the diet our American forebears have lived on for 400 years. And, strangely, many lived into their eighties, nineties, and or even past 100.
Cigarettes are not part of anyone's "diet," by the way.
“He left out a very important part of the 1930 - 1979 time period. Everybody was bored to tears.”
No, they weren’t. They had imaginations, something today’s kid lack. If some vidiot device doesn’t give them a full color 3D motion video they don’t know what to imagine.
Kids today with all their electronics are the most bored brats out there. They have “meltdowns”, i.e. temper tantrums, all the time from being bored.