Smarter and better off? Maybe, but we’ve given up our morals for it. Back in the day you could work in a factory or another local business and support a family, good luck trying to do that now you’d be on welfare! And you’d be replaced by a trans/gay/whatever at the drop of a hat for “diversity reasons”.
F em!
“we are freer to express ourselves” Major perception difference. I am not freer to express myself than my dad was, especially at work. My kids are not freer to express themselves than I was, especially in public school and college. Their teachers are terrified of inadvertently making some innocent comment that will be taken the wrong way and turn into a major hassle.
We value our family, our friendships. We respect the families of others. Family is the core of government and society. That is what we value. Family is precisely what has been destroyed and why we feel alienated.
I’m 59, I like to ask my peers “who’s childhood would you rather have had, yours or your kids?” After thinking a bit the answer almost always is “mine was better.”
I did NOT read the article, but fifty years ago;
I had skilled trades job plus a part time job.
Damn good health benefits. I do not think I paid over 300 bucks out of pocket for the kids births.
We owned our house and the mortgage.
We had a new car and I drove a clunker or motorcycle to work
My wife stayed at home with the kids.
There was a few bucks left over for a savings acct.
I think I would trade for those days back in a New York Minute.
I used to get in to the movies for $0.25, 2 full length movies, 2 cartoons and a news reel. Popcorn was a quarter and a soda was a dime, candy a nickel. A dollar purchased 4 gallons of gasoline, same as a silver dollar. Interest on your savings account was 3 percent.
My first car was a new VW, $1,950.00.
Today a dollar buys half a gallon of gas, but the silver dollar buys7 gallons.
Movies are $8.00 - $12.00, popcorn is $11.00. A VW is $23k.
Can’t you just hear the sneer bleeding through his smug, sanctimonious screed?
Makes a lot of statements without anything to back up his claims that we are better off today than 50 years ago rings hollow.
After all, 50 years ago, murdering babies was considered murder. The half breed was an unknown kid not destroying the country; we weren’t anywhere near $ 20 TRILLION in debt and we still had a viable two party government.
By any measure, between 1900 and 1950 life became far more comfortable, far richer, far safer, and far more optimistic than at any similar period in the previous 2000 years. Since 1950 personal freedom and personal opportunities have decreased at a geometric rate.
Now half the population doesn't even have an extended family much less communities where people actually get to know one another on more than a superficial level. In fact, many people forty and fifty years ago refused promotions because they'd have to move and disrupt their kids high school days or because they wouldn't be close their families. Now, more often than not people have to move or be unemployed.
And that doesn't even take into account that any high school kid that wanted a part time job could find one or that most people had a steady job or that doctors at the time made payment arrangements with their patients without a bank or credit company in the middle.
You also weren't tripping over tattooed, tramp stamped, lard butts, hanging out of their clothes everywhere you went because people still had some self-respect and didn't want to run the streets like feral hogs in heat. People haven't been liberated, they've been methodically degenerated and no amount of garbage about accepting one another can change the fact that people who don't have any self-respect have no respect for others either.
If we haven't already crossed the line, we're damn close to crossing the line that separates educated thought from being nothing but terminal stupidity with a specialized vocabulary.
JMHo
I was thinking of this yesterday, not in terms of economics, but just life in general in the US, 1965 was a better time, a more civil, decent time. I would trade this time for those days in a heartbeat.
50 years ago average Americans didn’t feel like pawns in an international economic chess game. That alone is better than all the riches in the world.
50 years ago America was on top. Now, we are in a state of decay and decline and on the way to becoming a hellhole that may soon become unstoppable without a change in mode of thought and type of leadership.
Life was better 50 years ago, people were taking care of me.
50 years ago my dad could always find cheap readily available 22 Long Rifle for me to shoot.
Medicine is the ONLY thing that progresses to the positive.
Everything else about society has gone downhill.
I’m better off than I was 50 years ago because I was six years old. No, we didn’t have the internet, only had four channels on the TV (and one of them was snowy) and didn’t have air conditioning in the car or in the house.
But on the other hand, I would spend the next 10 years running around the neighborhood with my friends, playing sports and shooting off our BB and Pellet guns. Oh, there may have been some explosives and fire, too, but we don’t need to get into that right now. And in my personal time I devoured every history and political book I could lay my hands on.
So, I guess I’m better off. But life for my kids is going to suck.