The Future?

I was born a few years after the end of World War II, so anything for me after about 1973 IS the future in my mind. I watched even in the 1950s there only be black and white TVs that were any good at all, to transistor radios that we held like Ipods now in the palm of our hands listening to the latest radio stations(in Los Angeles KRLA and KFWB) which were the two rock and roll stations then there. I watched Frisbees, Hula hoops and many other physical crazes that still continue be born. The Beach Boys, Elvis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and many many other popular groups and people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez championed the rights of people all around the world. The world Changed and is still changing every day from those days. Sputnik scared the hell out of the poeple in the U.S. and Europe and then the space race was born through President Kennedy. Bay of Pigs in Cuba as well as the Cuban Missile Crisis made many think the end of the world for humans had arrived. Landing on the moon meant to us in the U.S. that we had won the space race. The 1970s brought the deaths of people like Janis Joplin and Jimmie Hendrix which ended the idealism of the Hippie Drug culture and brought everyone back down to earth except for a few for whom it was too late.

The 1970s brought the Arab Oil Embargo and gasoline in the U.S. going from 17 cents a gallon to suddenly 50 cents to 85 cents a gallon over a period of weeks and months. Since the minimum wage was still only about 1 dollar an hour or more then, this began to change people's driving habits and people began to buy more Ford Falcons, and Chevrolet Corvairs and VW vans and Bugs since bugs got 30 mpg of gas. Recessions became more frequent also after the Viet Nam War and during those recessions it was no longer 4 to 5 percent unemployment but then 6 then 8 and finally 10 percent during the

1. Early 1980s recession - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1980s_recession

   The early 1980s recession describes the severe global economic recession affecting much of the developed world in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The United ...

   Recession in the United States - Recession in the United Kingdom - Recovery
2. The U.S. Recession of 1980-1982

   www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/rec1980.htm

   The recession which occurred in the early 1980's was the most severe and the most significant in terms of economic policy of the post-World War II recessions.
3. 1980-82 Early 1980s Recession - University of California, Berkeley

   bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/debt/1980srecession.html

   Mar 7, 2011 – Between 1980 and 1982 the U.S. economy experienced a deep recession, the primary cause of which was the disinflationary monetary policy ...

    

   end quote from Wikipedia and Google.

    

   I was 32 in 1980 and married for the second time with one son I was raising from my first marriage and 2 step kids from my second and this recession hit us and everyone else very hard. So we sold one of our vehicles to buy building materials (which were relatively inexpensive then) and liquidated most of our savings to buy 2 1/2 acres of land to build a home on and hten my father and I and my friends and wife and kids all built an A-Frame at 4000 feet elevation on the side of Mt. Shasta on the acreage with a spring for water. This worked out well on every level and got us through the recession with a Mt. Shasta Wilderness Family experience of Home Schooling our kids using independent study courses from:

   Oak Meadow: Homeschooling Curriculum, Resources, and Support

   www.oakmeadow.com/

   Creative homeschooling curriculum and fully accredited K-12 school. Project-based, innovative materials for your home-based educational journey.

   Grades K-8 - High School - Homeschooling with Oak - Login

    

   Later we moved back to the coast near San Francisco and bought a business so the kids could go through junior high and High School there.

    

   The 1980s were a very unusual time for not only us but also the world. We traveled a lot as a family studying almost everything our kids or we were interested in. This prepared all our children for college and helped us all sort of become more Cosmopolitan and worldly in our views and not so ethnocentric as most Americans, Chinese and Russians and some other nationalities tend to be.

    

   Then the end of the Iron Curtain really changed things a lot in a way no one really expected. One song was, "It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine".

    

   By the 1990s all our children had finished High School or gotten GEDs and had entered college. All 3 have college degrees now.  

   
   

   The1990s were very different for me because my father had passed away in 1985 and many people I knew started dying both my age and older than me. My wife's mother passed away in 1999 and I thought I might lose my wife over it too. But a grief counselor helped a lot with that.  Of my 3 best friends from childhood 2 died between 2006 and 2010 as well as all my remaining Aunts and 2 of my cousins and my mother in 2008. So, since 1999 it sort of seems like almost everyone left has died except my kids and my cousin's kids of my family tree. So, in some ways it has become more lonely but as my children have grown up (the oldest 41 and the youngest now 16 they have sort of taken the place of all those leaving so it hasn't been as bad. Most love to ski like I do so skiing trips are really fun since I can afford to take them with me whenever the skiing is good and the have the time.

   
   

   
   So, I guess "The Future" is relative to how you see things. For me, I now live in the Future because "The Future" for me is anything past about 1973 when I was 25.