"Old Days" don't seem better to one who has lived

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I don't know if this is the right forum but I mean the subject in reference to political and cultural issues that are widely discussed here.

There seems to be a general agreement that society has gone downhill in the last few decades although there is disagreement on the causes and precise meaning of that sentiment.

I was born in the early 50s and I sincerely don't agree with this although I won't venture an explanation. I am throwing this out to readers of any age who might care to comment, thanks!

In 1932, the year that FDR was first elected the society had not merely gone downhill, it was square in the toilet. If a smiley faced socialist like FDR has not been elected the U.S. may be gone the route of full bore fascism. Instead we got "soft fascism" which we have been living under since. And this is hardly a new thing for the U.S.

Woodrow Wilson was a "soft fascist" and Abraham Lincoln was a not so soft-fascist. During Lincoln's first administration newspaper editors were jailed without a writ of habeus corpus for opposing the War against the Confederacy.

ruveyn

The same things happening now were happening in the "old days."....they're just more publicized now.

I don't find much difference in kids then, and kids now. The only difference is their access to computers and video games rendering many street games obsolete.

You are in the "baby boomer" generation , and they are considered the wealthiest generation in America. So, everything might look good to you, compared to say a generation Y, college grad working at a low wage service job. (no offense intended )

Good point which I won't dispute.

Although admittedly what I had in mind was somewhat older folks (45+) who think that commercialism, globalization, pop culture, etc. have destroyed some positive aspect of society they remember from their youth or possibly their parents' youth.

Kids tend to be more disrespectful to their parents, nowadays.

There's lots of PC lurking amongst us. Since when did kissing a woman's hand constitute sexual harassment?

The media has become too much of a pervasive influence. This seemed to start when all shows were pre-empted because OJ was being chased by cops in a Bronco. In the 1960's, shows were pre-empted only when JFK was assassinated. Every little thing has seemingly become a banner headline.

Kids are not able to amble into the woods and make up their own games. I think it's a pity.

I live near Detroit, and I often heard from older folks, "Back in the day, as a high school grad you could show up to a steel mill, or auto factory and easily get a job to support a family. Now those jobs are gone".

You live near Detroit so things have admittedly gone downhill catastrophically. Detroit is probably now in worse shape than it has ever been. But New York City seems to have gone uphill some. Times Square is now the gosh darn nicest place you could bring the kids whereas it used to be a horrifying crime pit.

I'm in that demographic (age 47) so I will say that some positive aspects of (U.S., middle class) society that I remember have been destroyed. Specifically I am thinking of independent outdoor play which seems to have been replaced almost entirely (in the middle class) by hyper-supervised organized sports play. There were sports too when I was a kid but mostly run by the kids. Outside of Little League baseball, the adults didn't meddle in kids' games.

Oddly enough, the internet seems to have lessened the shackles of commercialization compared to my youth. The entertainment industry used to have a much firmer hold on media consumption. But these days, people can share their creativity on Youtube, Deviantart, etsy and Amazon (kindle allows self publishing). This did not used to be possible. You used to need a record contract, a publishing contract, a peddlers license for a kiosk, in order to share your creations (with minor and limited exceptions such as zines and people selling stuff in their yards or from a guitar case). The corporate middleman is now so much easier to get around thanks to the internet.

I am almost 50 (born in 1964) and I loved growing up during the '70's and '80's.

There was more naivite, but a lot less general stupidity, violence, greed and corruption.

I always get miffed by 20-somethings who go; 'It was way worse back in those days and it only just seems worse now, because we have the internet and greater media coverage and representation'.

Young people will vehemently disagree with me and I vehemently disagree with them and any sort of 'proof' severely lacks on both sides without crime statistics, standard of living statistics etc available for the last 50 years for any specific country, so nobody is prepared to take another's 'word for it'.

I guess I am just getting WAY too old now (50 going on 90) to say; 'those young whippersnappers of today's world have no idea what life was like back when I was a kid - what the hell would they know about it? - they are only just out of freaking diapers themselves'.

Yup, getting old and starting to sound like grandma and now I understand why.

We wait around playing video games in our spare time, taking our soma, and getting bombarded with propaganda 24/7; defenceless, as the oligarchs steal the nations wealth and return us little by little to abject slavery; while a police state apparatus is constructed to swiftly eliminate any attempt made by the slaves to improve their condition.

Last edited by Stannis on 29 Jun 2014, 11:03 pm, edited 2 times in total.

The older decades always look better because we were young then.

I remember thinking everything sucked back when I was younger and that the future was going to be so much better. Then we reach the future and the past don't seem all that bad.

Even though I was an 80s and 90s child, I now think those two decades are considered a bit overrated.

Those decades were better because they hadn't invented reality tv yet.
When I was young I thought of the 21st century as having flying cars and tourists going to Mars and such. But now it seems the biggest innovations are phone-zombies that are hooked on social media crap and don't even look where they are walking, and all channels turning into "reality" nonsense tv. And of course the crazy islamists were not as loud as they are now. I hadn't expected people chopping other people's heads of with knives and swords in the 21st century.

There were no videos games in the 1960s, virtually no video games in the 1970s.

You're about 52 years late.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candid_Camera

More than 52 years too late. Candid Camera started in 1948.