Posted on 07/28/2012 3:55:27 AM PDT by Kaslin
Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1962, America was a far different place from what it is today. President John Kennedy was presiding over Camelot, and despite fouling up the invasion of Cuba, his approval rating hovered at around 80 percent. Unemployment was 5.2 percent with the average family income at $6,000 a year.
Most Americans did not have much money but made do. Millions bought Elvis Presley's record "Return to Sender" and went to see "Lawrence of Arabia" in movie theaters. At home, "Wagon Train" was the top TV show.
Years later, the film "American Graffiti" featured the ad campaign "Where were you in '62?" Well, I was on Long Island, hanging around. During the day, we swam at the Levittown pool and played stickball in the street, and in August, my father took us to a lake in Vermont. Also, we went to Jones Beach and baked in the sun without block while secondhand cigarette smoke engulfed us on the blanket.
My folks had little disposable income, certainly not enough for air conditioning or a color television set. But again, there was little whining in my working-class neighborhood. We had fun with what was available. Most everybody worked. Nobody was on welfare.
In fact, just 6 percent of Americans received welfare payments in 1962. Now that number is 35 percent. More than 100 million of us are getting money from the government, and that does not count Social Security and Medicare, programs workers pay into. This is a profound change in the American tradition.
Also, we now have close to nine million workers collecting federal disability checks. In 2001, that number was about five million. Here's my question: Is the workplace that much more hazardous than it was 11 years ago? Is our health that much worse?
The answer is no. What we are seeing is the rise of the Nanny State.
Self-reliance and ambition made the United States the most powerful nation on Earth. But that ethic is now eroding fast. Instead, many Americans are looking to game the system, and the philosophy of "where's mine" has taken deep root. About half of American workers pay no federal income tax, leaving the burden to be shouldered by the achievers. As The Edward Winter Group once sang: "Come on and take a free ride. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!"
Presiding over and joyously encouraging this societal shift is the purveyor of social justice President Barack Obama. His entire campaign is now built around making the rich "pay their fair share." And where will that money go? To those in need, of course. And those legions are growing larger every single day.
Fair-minded people do not begrudge a safety net for Americans who, through no fault of their own, need help. A compassionate society provides for those battered by life. But what is happening in this country is far beyond a helping hand. We are creating a dual society. In one corner: Americans who work hard to succeed. In the other corner: folks who want what you have.
And the second corner is the growth industry.
I was six years old, enjoying a happy childhood. I love to ask people “who’s childhood would you rather have, your’s or your kid’s?” Most say “theirs.”
“When Blacks started shopping in “White stores” it didn’t help Black neighborhoods and businesses.”
Yep, as Dr. Sowell has pointed out, before “Civil Rights” blacks were forced to use black businesses - and those businesses had a stake in keeping their neighborhoods clean and safe.
“My father worked at Rocketdyne on the F-1 rocket engines for the Saturn V. He used computers in designing the engine and the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module(LEM) had a guidance computer. Computers were also used to build the Space Shuttle.”
Yea, there were some mainframes around for the really complex simulations and stuff like that. But nearly everything else was done by hand. Just ask your father (if he’s still with us) for some documents from back then, and you’ll see.
Thank you, I knew someone would say it for me. Apparently we are about the same age. I was a new Navy recruit in boot camp at San Diego in June 1962. Straight from high school to boot camp.
“I must agree with you about the gays.
Now they are infecting our military.
This would be unacceptable in 1962.”
There was some stuff that I read that documented the entire path of the movement. It was amazing to read, just how brilliant these guys were to get to where they are now...and just how easily people who just thought they were tolerant, got suckered into all of their demands.
“It’s an attitude decline, not a material decline.”
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I basically agree and yet on the material side I have to consider the following things. My father was a poor carpenter yet we had forty acres of our own land, we ate mostly farm fresh food, believe me the fried chicken we had was vastly better than what is available now, so was the home killed and butchered pork. We did without a lot of things simply because my parents would not borrow money. If you had two thousand dollars in the bank then you had the price of a low end new car. How much is that today? People who said they had no money often had the price of several new cars in the bank and owned a house and a hundred acres or more without debt. Most of those I know who seem to be better off today have very little or even a negative net worth. A lot of what we have today simply did not exist back then but even if people tried to live with only what was available then how many carpenters with a stay at home wife can raise four sons on forty acres in the country now?
It really isn’t a simple comparison is it?
Listening to Jose Jiminez on the radio as they counted down...
Catching Huntley-Brinkley on the B&W TV.
Working in tobacco fields, catching soft crabs and selling them to a local restaurant, and baling hay in the Summer...and fishing with a cane pole back in the creek.
Life was good, and we didn't know we were 'poor'.
The computer that Rocketdyne used was the IBM 360.
Wikipedia has a good article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360
Rather primitive by today’s standards.
Like BOR and at about the same age, I was on Long Island but much farther out. We had milk, butter, cream, eggs, bread, Danish, and coffee cake delivered to the back door. We walked to the beach or rode bikes to the huge salt-water pool (much more interesting because it had three diving boards) also located on a beach. We ice-skated and played hockey on two different local lakes, bringing our skates & sticks to school in order to play during the week on the walk home. When the ice melted, we played basketball or tennis or pickup football. When we got home by dusk (5 p.m. or so), we had two hours to do homework or put in an hour of piano-practice before dinner (my father commuted and generally got home by 6:30), and another two hours on the books or in daddy-class after dinner. No TV-watching at all until we were in high school (and my father controlled the dials). My mother gardened, sewed, knitted, cooked, washed, ironed, read ravenously, oversaw the homework for her nine children. It wasn’t until the youngest was in sixth grade that she extended golf on the weekends into golf during the week—often with one or more of us kids. And we said the rosary on our knees immediately after dinner, every night—dates or no dates.
Which brings me to another facet of 1962. Catholics had no idea what would hit them as a result of John XXIII’s “throwing open wide the windows of the church.” Mass was in Latin, the priest faced the altar, separated from the community by an altar rail, the music was Gregorian or otherwise solemn, there were no readers, no “kiss of peace,” no female alter “servers.” On the other hand, there WERE prayers at the foot of the altar and superior schools run by nuns and/or brothers who kept the public school system honest. And in the public schools, both the pledge of allegiance and the Our Father were recited at the beginning of every day. The words “right” and “wrong” were part of the daily vocabulary, failed students repeated grades, and discipline was upheld in public and private classrooms. Homework, as mentioned, was voluminous and GRADED. Cheating, even on homework assignments, was punished; and “feeling good about yourself” meant “pride always comes before a fall.” Oddly enough, these “pressures” resulted in far fewer teen suicides than were evident in the later sixties and beyond.
No, we didn’t have cable (or even color) or computers or Iphones/pads (or even multiple phonejacks); and many of us got to drive only the family car. But, I agree with some posters here, I’d wish it back in a New York minute.
“delivered between 1965 and 1978”
Damn, he must have been busy back then - they were launching rockets with that engine in 1967, if not earlier.
Conceptual design was still on the drawing board at that point...
I had just graduated from a Catholic high school staffed by French-Canadian nuns,in a small Massachusetts town. I immediately went to work full-time in a typing pool in a local manufacturing firm. My pay was $1.25/hour ($60/week). My parents started charging me room and board, $15/week. I didn’t complain, because all my friends’ parents were doing the same thing. Unbeknownst to me, my parents were stashing the money away in a savings account that they used to pay for my wedding in 1966.
Everyone in the aerospace industry was busy.
This was the space race and we were determined to beat the Soviets to the moon.
There is no prize for the runner up.
I believe AlexW was referring to a moral decline and I don’t believe anyone can dispute that.
You're a girl, right?
FMCDH(BITS)
I was on board Renville APA 227 getting ready to invade Cuba.
moonshot925 SAID: Our standard of living is much higher now than it was in 1962.
How exactly has the country been in decline?
Were you even alive in 1962, moonshot925? Maybe some half assed statistics say that the standard of living is higher but they lie. I was there, I know. Have you even been aware of the state of the economy lately?
Besides, income does not necessarily determine "the standard of living". We had more freedom then, lots more. Husbands worked, wives stayed home and took care of the children, with only one person working in the family it was possible to buy a house, two cars and such comforts as TVs and radios. Today, even with both spouses working(in Bozoville however they are lucky to have even one working)most couples barely make it, anyone who says the standard of living, which is a poor way to determine how things are, is higher today, is full of sh**.
In 1962 I could buy a gun through the mail, walk down the street carrying one or have one or two strapped to me and no one would stop me or question me. I could ride in the back of a pick up without getting a ticket, I could cut the trees on my property without having to get a permit. I could go on and on about the freedoms we had then and don't have now but why bother? You are obviously an idiot or a troll.
Oh yeah? What about "Louie, Louie" by the Kingsmen? Did you know if you played it backwards it was pornographic? :-)
There were actually radio stations which refused to play the song and the FBI actually investigated whether it was pornographic. They found it was not and we all felt reassured.
No, you are saying the lifespan is longer, not that the "quality of life" is better.
You dodged the question.
I didn't dodge the question - stated three examples in my first sentence.
Since you want some examples. the city streets were safe, even for kids. We played outside after school. Obesity in children was not a problem (sidewalk skates helped there.) We spent weeks at the beach. We respected authority.
We didn't have as much materially - can't remember ever wanting a handheld calculator let alone a home computer but you could attend a state 4 year college for less than $1000 a year for room, board and tuition.
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