Why Is American Life So Much Harder Than It Was In The 50s and 60s?

This was a question asked on quora that I thought I was qualified to answer, as I was most definitely around in the 50s and 60s. I thought the question needed perspective about the nature of “so much harder” and why people have fond memories of an impossibly tough era. While the answer could be book length, I’ll offer this unedited response I posted there.

I lived in the 50s. Mercury fillings. DDT trucks every night at sunset poisoning a generation of kids as well as a lot of the food supply. The ever-present cold war and FBI which sold fear everyday in every way. “Strangers” were particularly suspect. Beatings and lynchings across the deep south, rousting minorities on the streets and beatings in the north, and sunset towns were more common than most think.

Penicillin given away like candy creating antibiotic allergies and making them useless for many infections. Smoking filterless cigarettes was cool and sold as good for many things. Leaded gas destroyed parts of the brain in hundreds of millions. Break down on a back road and it could take a week or more to get your car fixed.

A lot of “mother’s little helpers” dispensed freely. Women, married or not, groped at work with no ability to stop it. A lot of bullying in public schools. Nonconformity got you shunned and worse. Unbelievable prejudice against Jews and Italians to the point they had to create their own neighborhoods. A visit to a psychiatrist could get you fired and blackballed professionally.

There were no laws about clean air, clean water, highway transportation safety, no internet, no cell phones, no credit cards, no modern conveniences, and even the washing machines had a tub with a separate wringer. There wasn’t a gas station every few blocks, or even every few miles on the national highways. There were almost no fast food joints, and the diners pretty much all served the same slop.

The 60s helped millions break free of the “Mad Man” attitudes and embrace revolutionary things like equal rights, human rights, free speech rights, clean air, clean water, fewer poisons, less war, less money to the MIC and more to environmental cleanup, and while definitely a time of tension, also a time of experimentation, of new ways of relating to each other and our world, and a rejection of the assumptions of the 50s.

And yet in the 60s, almost every single thing I stated in the first two paragraphs kept happening. Lynchings, beatings, the FBI and CIA selling fear by the truckload, poisons in the food supply, women being assaulted in the workplace, lots of prejudice still in play in countless places, and very few conveniences except for appliances and more gas stations and fast food places.

Each time has its hard challenges. Each time has its unique benefits. We tend to romanticize the past while condemning the present.

And yet every person who’s ever expressed nostalgia for a prior era, upon being reminded of the difficulties of that era, remembers that we do have it better now than ever before in terms of health care, reasonably clean air and water, workplace safety regulations, vehicles which work great compared to past decades, and a thousand more modern conveniences. While things are more expensive and complicated, we also are more connected and mobile than ever before in human history.

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That was my original response. While I could easily add 50 more pages comparing and contrasting the good, the bad, and the ugly between then and now, I’d say that since time is a one way street and the 50s are now 70 years ago, it’s better to focus on the blessings we have and the blessings to come, individually and collectively, than to create a fiction that somehow the past is better than NOW.

Since NOW is all there is, then it’s best to be right here right now rather than get lost in a nostalgic time which never existed. Being fully present in the flow of the moment, breathing in Soul and breathing out Soul, is a blessing in itself.

Reprinted on crystalwind.ca with written permission from Robert Wilkinson. Copying this article to other blogs is strictly prohibited. It is copyright protected. 

© Copyright 2024 Robert Wilkinson

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