Living in the USA: 1970 vs 2020, better or worse?

I see a lot of bs hype from the right here at PF about how bad things are: our college campuses are cesspools of socialist ideology, critical race theory and reverse racism is a rampant plague upon our rational and civil society, rioting in Portland Oregon represents the platform of the Democrats and all of our major metropolitan populations are scum.

What is wrong with you people? You haven't a freaking clue. We have no draft, there are no kids being shot by the National Guard, there are no bombings, there are no Black Panthers or Symbionese Liberation Armies and we do not have troops dying by the thousands in the jungles, mountains, fields and cities of Vietnam.

CRT, Antifa and Black Lives Matter - Y'all need to calm the f down if these are your concerns.

Guess what, "China Xoe" that some of you are bitching about is actually trying to move forward a long overdue federal program to refurbish Ike's highways and your man Mitch is determined that for four years Biden will accomplish as little as possible.

I wonder if China isn't laughing at this stupidity rather than that they are more than likely just shaking their heads.

 

Take Trump, and everything he did (or failed to do) out of the equation, and it becomes clear that things are much better now.

Communism, as a threat to us, is dead. Technology. Our life expectancy... it's a long list....

 

There is a portion of the American constituency that has simply lost its mind if it ever even had one to begin with. Yes, 2020 was bad, worse year in memory, but all of it falls squarely on Trump.

 

Perhaps this message would be more apropos if directed at BLM and its army of supporters?

 

I think there is probably a lot of interesting discussion that can come from this thread. I see a huge generation gap between people that were probably considered young adults in the 1970s and people that are young adults now. For simplicity lets call them boomers and millennials even though officially I think Gen X and Gen Z will also play into the mix. The boomer generation and the millennials have drastically different world views and those differences probably is the source of a lot of conflict and aggravation now. Maybe a boomer can answer this question but during the 1970s did you think the older people who were young adults in 1920s had a totally different world view than you which caused a lot of friction generational animosity. From a historical perspective it seems like the amount of change between the 20s and 70s was huge. Between the 20s and 70s you went through a World War, conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, a market collapse and depression, cold war with Russia, civil rights, women's equality etc... On paper those changes seem massive and you would think those 2 generations would be more drastically different then boomers and millennials now. From the 1970s to 2020 there was a ton of technological change and the world grew infinitely smaller because of it but it seems like the world was more stable in the last 50 years than the 50 before it. We have had no major war, racism is still an issue but previously you had the civil rights movement, the stock market has been strong given a few blips, the situation with Russia got better, China is a trading rival but that doesn't compare to the cold war with Russia, the middle east is a mess but I think it was back then too. The changes seem smaller yet from a societal viewpoint the divide seems huge. Was it this bad in the 1970s between the generations?

 

You bring up some very interesting points.

For myself, I grew up in what was considered a fairly conservative environment. Like our VP, Harris, I too was subject to school bussing, but unlike Harris' parents, they did not want to have me bussed across the city so they placed me in a local Baptist school which was even more conservative than my parents.

Growing up in that school until I reached high school age really immersed me in conservative evangelical thinking. I still remember my pastor's wife filling in for our regular science teacher and she gave a talk about "evolution", which was to basically implore us to never believe such satanic nonsense. It was there that I learned about apocalyptic thinking. You'd swear that Hal Lindsey was running the school with all the fear-mongering and the anticipation of the Rapture. It took me into my mid 20's to finally shake all that nonsense out of my system, but throughout the 80s, we all witnessed quite a few histrionics coming from the evangelical right. Anyone still remember those Satanic Panics?

The world of the 70s was definitely on the edge of world war, no doubt, but with the mentality of Christian evangelicals, I often observed an almost wishful attitude for the end to come. I think evangelicals still have a fondness for wanting the end times to finally get here, they're just now realizing that they may have to do something to kick it off.

 

Thanks for sharing your experience. Did you feel that older people back then did not approve or were very critical of your world views at that time?

 

I'll say this much about the standard of living in the 1970's:
I moved to Minneapolis to go to college, got a PART TIME (about 25-30 hrs a week) job as a dishwasher in a greasy spoon diner on East Lake Street for minimum wage.
I was able to afford an apartment, put gas in my jalopy and feed myself.

Yes, the apartment was a sardine can! It was maybe 130 square feet, it had a tiny bathroom with a corner sink barely big enough to wash your hands and a corner shower barely large enough for my 5'8" frame.
It had one of those mini-fridge/sink/2-burner stove combo units shoved against one wall, pretending to be a kitchen.
My diet mostly consisted of a lot of franks and beans or spaghetti.
But still, think about how many people can afford ANY kind of apartment on minimum wage today.

It was a crappy place but it was MY PLACE, I could afford to support myself. Lotsa luck with that today.

 

Indeed my friend, every word of yours is true.

 

1971 was the best year for recorded music. A sampling from a few genres.







Compared to the '70s, 2020 music sucks (assorted great blues guitarists excepted.)

 

I still have some Warren Haynes tickets for a show that got cancelled last year ... I forget all the guests but Michelle Branch was one ... I think Jonny Lang also but I'm getting old and can't be sure ... meh, still no shows here ...

 

I was grocery shopping the other day, and a six months old next to me was fingering his smartphone.

Don’t tell me not much has changed.

 

you're being sarcastic right? ...

 

Last show I saw was Tedeschi Trucks in Sacramento... Okay, holy Sh*t. Thank you so much man. I was just searching for shows and see KWS is gonna be in Carson City in October. I'll get back to ya. Lol.

 

Not really, not this time. Technology has changed people, and not for the better.

 

LOL, democrats have redefined infrastructure, something everyone can agree on considering its actual definition, to include every liberal wet dream.

 

Well, technically...


There were soft serve ice cream trucks in the '70s. Just sayin'.

 

Not really, because I still shared their worldview. It wasn't until the 80s (in my 20s) that I started questioning those beliefs and doing actual research on my own that I started slipping away from that mindset. IMO, conservative evangelicals would prefer to keep their kids in arrested development.

 

My wife loves Kenny ... *he's so cute!* ... but not much happening here in the valley ... we do have a local tequila joint that is hosting local jazz and blues sets again ... before the pandemic, they hosted a band from Mexico called Los Zeppelinos ... mariachi style zep music ... had to take an Uber home that night ...

 

@Shinebox It's a two day blues festival at the old V&T RR Eastgate Depot. I just got tickets.

Battle, Axe & Tracks (battleaxeandtracks.com)



Thanks again.

More. Blue on Black...classic.

 

That's very interesting. Imagine the difference between 1870 and 1920 as well. Rockefeller built the Standard Oil empire and whales began to breathe a sigh of relief. Electric infrastructure threatened to end the market for the primary use of Standard Oil's product: kerosene lamps. And then came Mr. Ford and cars, rapidly followed by numerous other manufacturers entering the market. Standard Oil found a new demand that exceeded its kerosene market. The civil war was a fresh memory and the horrid Great War ended monarchies across Europe. Railroad empires, the Amazon of the times were established. Women in the US achieved the right to vote, talk about a different world. And the Spanish Flu killed substantially more folks than Covid19 comes anywhere close to having killed.

I'm not a big fan of categorizing people by their age or any other demographic. I had to attend a mandatory "Generational Awareness" seminar at work once. The corporation's premise was that it was valuable to our management to learn how to manage the aspirations of millennials. It seemed a bogus premise to me and it still seems a bogus premise to me. Work is work, plumbing is plumbing, hvac is hvac, medicine is medicine, accounting is accounting, etc.... However I did learn one thing from that seminar that made sense to me and still does: grandparents and grandkids have an affection for one another that contrasts with the often confrontational relationship between parents and their children. So the takeaway from this was that Boomers had an affection for Millennials and from my point of view at our particular office this seemed to actually explain some stuff.

I hadn't even thought of comparing the previous 50 years with this OP. And I wasn't even thinking of this as a generational issue. Nor was I considering all of the stuff in between 1970 and 2020. I was only thinking of a point in time versus a point in time and the political hot button issues between them.

Thanks, interesting expansion on the topic.

 

Depends on your metric. I was talking to this WWII vet yesterday--the last one I know alive-- and he was talking about growing up. Toward the end of that part of the conversation he said, "I think it is better to be alive now than at any time in history, or at least in my lifetime." We weren't discussing politics. He was telling me where people used to park their horses near where we were to get on the trolley to ride though the shopping district, how coming into the city to go to stores was a big undertaking that took all day and not often done and now we can order stuff from anywhere on the planet in a matter of minutes of our telephones, etc etc.

 

Wow. I had a similar experience in Louisville Ky at a public school that I was bussed to in 7th grade. I was assigned to a particular teacher for "core" classes. I can't remember what this meant exactly other than we spent about half the day with this guy. I think it was supposed to be English, History and Civics. The teacher was a charismatic type of guy that also happened to be an evangelical. He was very popular because of his charisma and most all of the other kids that had other core teachers wish they had had him instead. I think maybe I learned some decent concepts on Civics, but not so much on whatever else he was supposed to have taught us. What I do remember vividly are these insane little comic books he distributed to "select" kids in our class. Apocryphal end of the world little booklets about 2 inches tall and 3.5 inches wide with about a dozen pages printed on both sides. I read through a few of these, maybe 3 or 4 before I decided I wasn't interested in being further evangelized by this dickhead; although at the time I still liked him very much. I think some of my classmates helped me out by telling me that that stuff was sketchy at best if not outright crazy. Kiss and KC were very popular, but I was fortunate enough to have influences that made me consider the Might Zeppelin to be the North Star of music.

Those little evangelical comics still haunt me. They predicted super computers that would contain all the world's information on every person on the planet. Creepy huh? 1977....

 

Music of the late 60's through the the 70's was awesome. There are some great music isn's today, but most of the music now seems to be created through computer skills and not musical ability