moi621 (imported) wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2011 4:01 pm
Lance and Tilt do not remember the days. They cannot.
In the fifties you had no knowledge of the psychiatric or alcoholic within a home as taxed the spouse. Then suddenly they could separate and get divorced.
And teachers could teach! And not rely on parental involvement except for disciplinary problems. Like not turning in home work. Once a year there was a "Parents Teachers Night" at the school.
Teachers taught and bad kids were not allowed to disrupt. (Irvine 11)
Moi
Born in '48.
Moi, as usual, you are full of shit.
I went to the school in the 50s and it was nothing like that:
We set off cherry bombs in the boy's restroom, we skipped school, and I had two report cards, one my parents saw and one I turned back into the school.
I had good teachers and teachers that couldn't teach their way out of a paper bag.
We had morning prayers to a Christian god, and it didn't matter if you didn't believe in that god.
Seventh grade students in Jr. High were hazed, and kids were bullied, and there was nothing a teacher would do about it.
We raised hell, talked back to teachers, and were sent to the Principal's office.
If we got paddled by a teacher, we bragged about it. I would often antagonize a particular teacher just so he would haul me to the front of the class and give me some swats.
Out of all my high school teachers, I can only think of one, other than the head coach, we respected. We actually drove one from the school. She didn't come back for a second semester, and I don't really regret we did it: she was a terrible teacher.
We had fights just for the fun of it.
We blew up rural mailboxes with cherry bombs and M80s or played mailbox baseball like in Stand by Me.
14 and 15 year-old girls got pregnant and got kicked out of school.
Schools were segregated and Blacks weren't allowed to use the same restrooms or water fountains we were. There were two movie theaters in my home town, and Blacks could only go to one of them, which had a balcony in which they sat.
My first grade teacher, well respected by parents, was an ogre. No telling how many kids she ruined. She changed me from an outgoing, happy, kid to a frightened, shy, one. She hit me on the hand with a ruler because I didn't recognize a word. I peed all over the floor once because I was too afraid to ask to go to the bathroom.
We didn't have a TV until I was 13. I was eleven or so before I even saw a TV, which had maybe a 5" screen on which I could only see snow.
We had no air conditioning, and in the summer, when I lived in Kansas, my family sometimes slept on the front porch because it was too hot to sleep in the house.
In Kansas, I was bullied and beat up often by an older kid, who had a gang, and for some reason didn't like me. He once said he was going to make me suck his cock - I was fourteen - and when I wouldn't, he hit me instead. I managed to run into a neighboring house to escape a worse beating. If you'd called cops in those day about being bullied, they would have laughed at you.
Also, in Kansas, a kid entertained a crowd of us with dirty jokes during lunch every day and never told the same joke twice.
Parents weren't any better in the 50s:
My parents and their friends idea of a good time was to get together and drink. We often spent summer outings at a lake where a relative had a cabin. All the adults would spend the week or two drinking while all us kids played pretty much on our own. It was fun for us, but they weren't setting much of an example for us, were they? Then, there wasn't much for adults to do but drink. At least, with computers and shit, we have other options.
My parents didn't divorce, but that didn't stop my dad from regularly cheating on my mom. I have a half sister somewhere I've never met. One of my aunts was married multiple times however. Hell, my grandfather and grandmother never shared a bed during most of my life because he had cheated on her.
I remember the cold war, and I remember when people build bomb shelters because they were afraid. During the Cuban Missile Crises, they sold prefab bomb shelters in vacant lots by busy street corners.
There were some good things:
I spent a lot of time outside playing.
I learned to love reading and regularly walked to the town library for books.
Wasn't so many people in the world. I remember when the population of the USA was only 150,000,000.
Although things were cheaper, I remember seeing one of my dad's checks where he brought home about $60 for the week and there were five of us in the family. I had an after school job for .50/hr. When I first went in the Army, I made about $80/month.
Anyone that says the 50s were so fucking great doesn't remember the 50s. Like any other time, there was good things and bad things about the 50s.
Living alone as I do, I imagine I would be rather miserable without my TV and without my computers and the Internet. I have the world at my fingertips. I can even talk to idiots that believe the 50s were so great, if I wish. I can have friends that I've never met from all over the world. I can, at a glance, connect with friends and relatives and learn how they're doing. Anytime I want to know something, all I need do is search for it.
You can have the 50s, Moi. We're living in an exciting world, now. Doesn't mean we won't fuck it up, but we came close to fucking it up back in the 50s, too. We came awfully close to nuclear war even.
