Appearing to be normal

In the 1960s and 1970s young people were often strange because of circumstances beyond their control. The Viet Nam War made many many people my age either crazy or dead or first one and  then the other. Brothers, sisters and friends were dying, being maimed for life, coming back with incurable PTSD etc during those awful years, (50,000 American boys and some girls killed and 250,000 wounded and uncountable numbers of people with various forms of PTSD (Post traumatic STress Disorder) that sometimes caused them to kill others or themselves when they had flashbacks before or after returning to the U.S. mainland.

So, often the returning Veterans were strange (and some still are) and often young people used alcohol or drugs of various kinds to try to cope with their terror of what was happening to themselves or their relatives or friends. I don't think people who didn't actually go through this as a young person then could really imagine how hard it was for people then.

The problem now is that one cannot often find a job with or without a college degree to support oneself properly or to support a family. That wasn't the problem then at all. Often the problem then was just appearing to be normal when everything around you was seemingly going to hell and getting worse by the day. Then there were always jobs for anyone willing to work. It's just that you might not want to actually do those jobs because they were dangerous or so monotonous or you might lose fingers or hands while doing them then. So, one had to be very careful of keeping one's body in one piece. And often then people would come to work stoned on one thing or another because this is before drug testing became more normal for companies. So, many people were maimed or died until drug testing was instituted by business just as a matter of liability if nothing else.

So, during those times whether people were normal or not trying to appear to be normal even if you were crying or hysterical inside was important to many people who were scared out of their minds by the times in one way or another. Our problems were mostly different then but it is important to understand that in any era there are problems, they just change slightly from era to era.