Was life better before the war and in the 50's?

originally posted by: Restricted

people lived as if they weren't the only person alive

Decades ago it was more in the nature of civic responsibility. One picked up litter, disciplined children not necessarily your own, voted, called the police, helped your neighbors, gave up your seat for ladies, the elderly, and the sick.

It was a different time and sorely missed.

A specific culture.

Beware if you don't play by their rules.

People probably had a closer relationship with nature/soil i them days. Many people were still working the land and sea in old communiies that had not changed much in hundreds/thousands of years, BUT........................ Mechanisation of farming and fishing had begun and coutless people were being at that very time of pre/post war being made redundant from this sector and moving to the brand new council estates in the towns/cities to work in industry that post war was booming. Those same people still retained their living with the soil/nature by being give allotments of land to grow their own food. The retainment of mans relationship with nature/soil helped this new shift to living in the city. They were still attached to the land.

Today we are all so detached from the land, only a tiny % have a relationship with nature/soil and in many ways this is not natural, so maybe things were better back then in that fold. So many things have improved since, the average man in the street could hardly afford gifts for their kids at Christmas, struggled to afford a week in Blackpoll/Skeggy while we jet off to our hearts content, life expectancy has improved massively, we can now control our own minds too through the media while back then only the newspapers/BBC could give people indoctrination was much easier back then, industrial conditions were terrible while men by the million were still coaxed into horrible industries and extraction like coal mining which would kill them off at a rate not seen these days.

It's a balance, we lost our connection to nature but at the same time have a healthy lifestyle that back then can never compete with. Hindsight is often blinded by the good time memories but if my only option as general man on the street to avoid going hungry was to crarl hundreds of metres below Earths surface hacking away at thin seems of coal with a pick then I'd take today any time.

originally posted by: enlightenedservant

I also love listening to different forms of music from all over the world; hearing the legends and stories of various forgotten cultures; and even keeping tabs on local politics from all over the world. Just a generation ago, we were limited to the resources in our local libraries and universities to gain even a fraction of this knowledge

I love LINK TV.

I find the music videos from all over the world fascinating.

originally posted by: ufoorbhunter
People probably had a closer relationship with nature/soil i them days. Many people were still working the land and sea in old communiies that had not changed much in hundreds/thousands of years, BUT........................ Mechanisation of farming and fishing had begun and coutless people were being at that very time of pre/post war being made redundant from this sector and moving to the brand new council estates in the towns/cities to work in industry that post war was booming. Those same people still retained their living with the soil/nature by being give allotments of land to grow their own food. The retainment of mans relationship with nature/soil helped this new shift to living in the city. They were still attached to the land.

Today we are all so detached from the land, only a tiny % have a relationship with nature/soil and in many ways this is not natural, so maybe things were better back then in that fold. So many things have improved since, the average man in the street could hardly afford gifts for their kids at Christmas, struggled to afford a week in Blackpoll/Skeggy while we jet off to our hearts content, life expectancy has improved massively, we can now control our own minds too through the media while back then only the newspapers/BBC could give people indoctrination was much easier back then, industrial conditions were terrible while men by the million were still coaxed into horrible industries and extraction like coal mining which would kill them off at a rate not seen these days.

It's a balance, we lost our connection to nature but at the same time have a healthy lifestyle that back then can never compete with. Hindsight is often blinded by the good time memories but if my only option as general man on the street to avoid going hungry was to crarl hundreds of metres below Earths surface hacking away at thin seems of coal with a pick then I'd take today any time.

Thanks for a polite, well thought out reply!

Interesting way to think about it

a reply to: DBCowboy

Nor do I, that's because of Star Trek.

All these things like the internet, and small hand communicators...it's all Gene Rodenberry's fault.

so, how`s that desegregation working out for the black folks? well, they are all packed into ghettos now,black on black crimes are at an all time high,record number`s of them are living in poverty and on government assistance.

it seems to me that things are worse now for black people than it was in the 1950`s and I`m certain that in 50 years no black person will be looking back on 2010-2020 decade as the good old days.

white liberals can pat themselves on the back and raise a toast to all their hard work and believe that they have somehow helped black people and made their lives better but those white liberals aren`t living in ghettos,dependent on the government for survival and being victims of black on black crime.

explain to me again how much better blacks have it today than they did in the 1950`s?
if blacks love desegregation so much and it`s so good for them then why are they voluntarily segregating themselves from other races?

originally posted by: Tardacus
so, how`s that desegregation working out for the black folks? well, they are all packed into ghettos now,black on black crimes are at an all time high,record number`s of them are living in poverty and on government assistance.

it seems to me that things are worse now for black people than it was in the 1950`s and I`m certain that in 50 years no black person will be looking back on 2010-2020 decade as the good old days.

white liberals can pat themselves on the back and raise a toast to all their hard work and believe that they have somehow helped black people and made their lives better but those white liberals aren`t living in ghettos,dependent on the government for survival and being victims of black on black crime.

explain to me again how much better blacks have it today than they did in the 1950`s?
if blacks love desegregation so much and it`s so good for them then why are they voluntarily segregating themselves from other races?

Brilliant reply! Great points and something I have thought about often.

I have no answers but I'm looking forward to seeing the replies you get now.

*takes out popcorn*

a reply to: Tardacus

No one has mentioned that we all self-segregate even when given the option to mix.

This ain't racism.

a reply to: Tardacus

I can run for public office, have served on a jury, and have voted. I could do none of those during the Segregation period.

I've gone to various schools and went to college with ethnicities from all over the world. I can shop in any store I want and I can buy a house in any city or neighborhood I want if I have the money. I could do none of those during the Segregation period.

I can file charges against a non-"black" citizen; can be admitted into any general hospital in an emergency; and have even dated a white woman. I could do none of those during the Segregation period (I'll just assume you know that "white only" hospitals also rejected black citizens).

Employers & colleges can no longer reject me strictly because of my "race". Government agencies can no longer reject my license applications or applications for various business programs strictly because of my race (which they did during the Segregation period).

And for the record, "black on black crime" is just as stupid a phrase as "white on white crime". "White" Americans rape, kill, molest, abduct, and defraud each other every single day, yet I never hear that they should be ashamed of "white on white crime". Where are the cries for white community leaders to speak out every time a white person beats his wife or kids, commits suicide, gets in a drunken brawl at a bar, or robs a bank? Why aren't the white church leaders chided for not speaking out every time a white citizen is killed by a white cop or white family member, or kills another white person in a DWI?

For some reason, people like you place a ridiculous double standard on us that simply doesn't get placed on other demographics, much less on your own demographic. You act like organized crime & drug abuse don't exist in your own communities, too. American pop culture loves white criminals like the Sopranos, the Godfather series, Bonnie & Clyde, Scarface Al Capone and various other Mafioso & Mob figures, etc. (ETA: They even purchase the majority of "gangsta rap" music.) I wonder why we're supposed to overlook that?

Also roughly 3/4 of African Americans don't live in poverty. But seeing as you think we were better off during Segregation, you clearly don't know that either. In fact, it's clear you don't know anything about us, which is yet another reason integration is so badly needed in this country. Spending time around people from a different demographic will obliterate all of the idiotic stereotypes like the ones you spoke of.

a reply to: Annee

Interesting. I'd never even heard of that before. I'll have to investigate. I've been half-binging on K-Pop (South Korean pop music) and music from various African countries. A lot of the Ethiopian artists have a really positive vibe that's refreshing, though I can only understand a random word here and there.

Yet another reason modern times are amazing.

originally posted by: enlightenedservant
a reply to: Annee

Interesting. I'd never even heard of that before. I'll have to investigate. I've been half-binging on K-Pop (South Korean pop music) and music from various African countries. A lot of the Ethiopian artists have a really positive vibe that's refreshing, though I can only understand a random word here and there.

Yet another reason modern times are amazing.

They are online.

a reply to: enlightenedservant

That post right there is why I have problems being even remotely polite to folks who insist that nothing has changed, or is backsliding...

You touch on every argument I've ever made concerning how much America, and indeed the world (some parts of it), have changed even in my lifetime.

When I was born in 1963, JFK only had one month to live. In the Deep South, Jim Crow still held sway in many places, he's pretty much dead and buried today--just over half a century ago.

Women in the work place were limited to a few spots. Blacks. Hispanics. Orientals. Jews. All of those groups, and others, were unwanted and unwelcome.

My how times have changed. Not that there isn't a ways to go yet, but we're gettin' there. Fits and starts. Three steps forward, one back.

But there is a darkness out there that we've, maybe, just become aware of... A mass media that wants to control how we think. How we act. Who we vote for. Who we support.

Malcolm X (yeah, I know, a white guy quoting Malcolm X...times have changed, haven't they?)

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.

Listen to, and trust, what your own senses tell you.

I grew up in an area with a huge Hispanic population. Thirty years ago? There was not a single, solitary Hispanic owned business in my area. Not one.

Now? Dozens, and many of those owners are women. Men and women I've known since elementary school. They took advantage of the changes that started back in the fifties, and that continue to this day...

But will they? Frankly, I don't like what I'm seeing in the world around me... People being told that because I didn't vote a certain way, I'm somehow lesser than they. I was threatened with bodily harm last month because according to a couple of people, I looked like a Trump supporter. Huh. Doesn't sound all that different from "looking like a Jew", "...a Jap." "...a sand **bleep**." "...a raghead." Of course there there's commentary that goes the other way, too. Anyone who supported "Her" is a criminal leftist. A commie sympathizer. You all know the litany as well as I do.

The fifties deserve to be remembered fondly as the decade when things began to change for the better at a pace unprecedented in our history...but I see a danger that it may become all for naught.

Sorry for the off topic rant.

originally posted by: Tardacus
a reply to: 727Sky

more Americans spoke with a common voice and shared common goals...

that pinpoints todays problems perfectly. There is too much diversity,too many people wanting too many different things and when the government can`t make everyone happy people start screaming discrimination.

Too many people with completely different goals are trying to pull the country in the direction that they want it to go and the country ends up going nowhere, because everyone is pulling in different directions.

humans should learn from nature, nature is very diverse but it doesn`t try to jam all that diversity into one place each thing has it`s own place and it`s own purpose.Birds have the sky to fly in and fish have water to swim in, if nature tried to change that to not "discriminate" against either the birds or the fish things would be a real mess.nature doesn`t need flying fish because it already has birds and nature doesn`t need birds that live under the water because it already has fish.

a country can`t survive if the people don`t have similar goals and values.It`s not possible for people with very different goals to live together peacefully and in equality.

We're moving towards a world society of a mixed nature. You can't honestly compare fish and birds to different races and different cultures. Because of technology and knowledge exchange, the ocean and the air--to make an analogy--are coming together. This is forcing all the races and cultures to mix, as if the fish and birds mixed. In your hypothetical world, the ocean and air didn't mix. This doesn't mean there's no stratification into different environments, but it likely doesn't fit your neat framing of it. The future is so highly unpredictable we can't know what those environments will be. Maybe off-earth humans will enter a different environment, for example. Or maybe some people will exist solely on computers. Right now we do not know.

Even as a white guy, I would have to say that Malcolm X was a pretty smart dude, yeah I have read the book.

a reply to: jonnywhite

I think eventually it's gonna be about applied intelligence and who can evolve in a progressive technical world.

Even farming is more about science today.

The passing from father to son isn't gonna cut it anymore.

originally posted by: seagull
a reply to: DBCowboy

Nor do I, that's because of Star Trek.

All these things like the internet, and small hand communicators...it's all Gene Rodenberry's fault.

Apparently he didn't come up with those ideas on his own..

He was..."inspired" and had a little help...

originally posted by: Annee

originally posted by: Restricted

people lived as if they weren't the only person alive

Decades ago it was more in the nature of civic responsibility. One picked up litter, disciplined children not necessarily your own, voted, called the police, helped your neighbors, gave up your seat for ladies, the elderly, and the sick.

It was a different time and sorely missed.

A specific culture.

Beware if you don't play by their rules.

find me a culture that doesn't have it's own 'rules'.
try being a Republican at a U.S. university. that's some hostile groupthink.
www.foxnews.com...

somehow 'pick up your trash' doesn't sound too onerous.

originally posted by: Annee

originally posted by: fusiondoe

originally posted by: berenike
I've been doing a little bit of research recently into old TV and radio programmes and think that the following illustrates how cosy the UK could be (for some, in some respects) in the Fifties.

There was a radio programme called Listen With Mother, aimed at the under fives. Each weekday afternoon, for about 15 minutes, the little ones would be entertained with a story and nursery rhymes:

www.turnipnet.com...

Another particularly memorable song, which featured at least once a week, ended: This is the way the old men ride, Hobble-dee Hobble-dee Hobble-dee and down into a ditch!

It is quite likely that this latter song was the origin of the following anecdote sent in by George Dixon's son, Paul: "My father told us one story about the programme. A listener had called in with the complaint that her child had been terrified by the sound of galloping horses. It was explained to her that the sound effect was made with the traditional half coconut shells, and how she could make the sound herself to show the child. They would not run that song again until she let them know that the child understood, which she did. Presumably there was one satisfied customer!"

I think that is similar to the sort of community feeling and caring that your grandparents were referring to.

Here's a link to a BBC site featuring an interview with one of the producers. Try listening to it, it's charming and really is from a bygone age:

www.bbc.co.uk...

Here is a transcript because I can't work out how to post the video:

Producer: When I'm building a programme, I always have in mind just a child or a couple of children in the intimate setting of the home, with or without mother, although we call the programme Listen with Mother.

We find still that children believe that the storyteller is inside the box in some way, that this disembodied voice creates a very concrete and vivid image in the minds of the children.

Interviewer: What about the piano? That must be rather a problem to accommodate that in the radio as well?

Producer: Well, indeed. One child we heard of walked round and round the box and did express great surprise that, not only was the speaker there, but the piano there too, but didn't question it, didn't query this. And children very often go to the set and stroke it and touch it and press their ears close up to it, treating it very much as they would treat a visible storyteller.

Interviewer: Do they seem to have a sense that the stories are being told just for them individually?

Producer: Indeed yes, they believe that the storyteller sees them. They believe that she hears their replies. We heard of one little girl, who talked to her little boyfriend next door, and who said, my lady played Humpty Dumpty today, and the little boy's reply was, so did mine. They didn't at all think that this was the same programme. They still thought it was an individual programme each for her or for him.

Thanks! This is the sort of thing I was referring too!

I don't think non-Americans understand the dominant power of the Christian Religious Right (mostly white) in America.

look at today's media and culture and tell me how much influence white Christians have.

You talk about your kid show. When Sesame Street came on TV in America it was boycotted and protested by the Christian Right for its diversity and having ethnically diverse hosts.

source?

Anything outside the "norm" was bad. The "norm" being white Christian.

white Christians were 50% to 80% of the population. numbers make the norm. the rapid changes afterward indicate that the 1950s U.S. was much more tolerant than you realize.

I don't see it much different then forced Marshall law with an ideaology of fear if you break the rules.

I think you mean Martial law. I wasn't around in the 50s but I think I'd have heard of freethinkers and free spirits were rounded up en masse and hauled away. beatniks? southern California? the reality is, every culture has values, and frowns on those who differ.

We are a diverse country still fighting to break free from a forced ideology. Millions & millions of dollars have been and are still being spent today on this.

We are not a Norman Rockwell painting.

'forced ideology'??? like freedom of speech or freedom of worship?

10 Hilarious Right-Wing Freak-Outs Over Children's Cartoons: www.alternet.org...'s_cartoons

dailycaller.com...

In early December, taxpayer-funded officials in the Hillsboro, Oregon school district banned imagery of Santa Claus because “images and artifacts” “like Santa Claus” create insufficiently “inclusive and welcoming spaces.”

so, what? forcing people to celebrate Christmas (the cultural norm at that time/place) was wrong, but refusing to allow people to celebrate Christmas is right?

originally posted by: Annee

originally posted by: flatbush71
What I really want to know, is how many of you lived back in that time or are just repeating what you have heard and read.

I was born in 1946.

I had to wear dresses to school, even when it was freezing.

I could be a cheerleader for the boys sports teams. But, I couldn't play.

My disabled, single mom made far less then her male co-worker for the same work.

Teachers showed favoritism, because they could.

My Jewish classmates were forced to participate in both Easter & Christmas pageants.

You could choose who moved into your neighborhood.

A lot of stuff was kept behind closed doors.

Women had little recourse for an abusive husband.

Good is very selective.

well of course some of those things are inexcusable. people are not perfect and no time/place is perfect. it's good that we've made progress in these areas. nobody here is advocating a return to segregation, abused wives or unequal pay, not to mention social shunning. I just wish we could have kept the good parts.

originally posted by: fusiondoe
I visited my Grandparents this week and over a very fine bottle of Single Malt Scotch in my Grandfathers special Xmas stash, I sat down and listened to one of his many stories and something struck me.

My grandparents always speak so lovingly and highly of life back in the 50's. The feeling of freedom and elation after winning the war. The sense of community where everybody shared what little they had with each other and there was no greed. Playing on bomb sites, living on the same street as other family members and so much more.

When I look at the world today, the strangers on the trains with their heads buried in their iPhone and the teenagers sitting indoors on their Xbox day in day out, I can't help but think... life sounded so much better then.

As my grandfather put it... back then nobody had anything so you were happy with your lot, there wasn't any greed or selfishness.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s and I feel growing up then was awesome. We always were outside from sun up to sun down.

There was always things to do.Arcades,drive in movies,and my home town was always packed with kids "cruisin" on the weekend.

I admired folks that got to enjoy the 50s.My dad used to talk about it a lot.

I feel sad for kids today.Social media is ruining their social skills.There is no face to face friends hardly anymore. Its done with a click of a button nowadays.