How people have changed since 1950 in the U.S.

I am presently 65 years old so my personal memories of people go back to around 1950 in Seattle, Washington in Lake Forest Park on my Grandad's 2 1/2 acres there. I was exposed mostly to Building Contractors and tradesmen except in Church where all classes of people were then. So, for example, my father and his best friend were very proud of what they could build and spent a lot of time building beautiful things on weekends and working on their cars so they looked perfect. Both my parents were also ministers at least one day a week led classes even then at church usually on Monday's, Tuesdays or Wednesdays nights or sometimes on Sunday. So, church was a big part of our lives then. People I knew then were working class but usually very smart and made a good living and owned acreage and properties and owned houses like my Grandfather. And my father expected to eventually own his own land and build his own house somewhere himself on weekends which he eventually did but not starting until 1968 though he owned a couple of pieces of property that he had intended to build on before this like when I was 4 in Vista when he owned land at Mr. Pretorius' lands where he was trying to build a community of health minded people. "The Golden Door' which is a weight reduction place there (if it is still there) near Escondido is what I believe remains of all this now.

One of the ways to better understand people then is to understand that they were greatly affected (many did not survive at all) the Great Depression and World War II and the Korean War. So, there was always these kinds of terrors in the background still haunting all of us from World War II and then the Korean War after that. And in the back of everyone's mind was that most people were very fatalistic about us eventually dying from a worldwide or just the mutually assured destruction because the U.S. and Western Europe on one side and the Soviet Union and possibly China on the other.

So, this was a pretty horrific group of things ongoing from 1929 until 1990. It was never ending and drove many people insane living with it and thinking about it. So, many American Soldiers and Spies and others died along the way trying to keep our country safe and intact. And at times it seemed very touch and go especially when Kennedy was assassinated.

Imagine you are in a Cold War with the Soviet Union since the end of World War II and that they have similar nuclear weapons to the U.S. too. This is something we lived with every day. In fact, the facedown in the Fall of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to blowing each other off the face of the map. So, for many of us it wasn't surprising that Kennedy would be killed for this within about a year later. However, we were now leaderless in wartime which was completely terrifying like when FDR died near the end of World War II and then Truman came in and nuked two cities in Japan.

 

1. Cuban missile crisis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_missile_crisis‎

   The Cuban missile crisis—known as the October crisis (Spanish: Crisis de octubre) in Cuba and the Caribbean crisis (Russian: Kарибский кризис, tr. Karibskiy ...

   ‎Cuban Project - ‎PGM-19 Jupiter - ‎Ilyushin Il-28 - ‎Curtis LeMay

2. Cuban Missile Crisis - John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

   www.jfklibrary.org › JFK › JFK in History‎

   For thirteen days in October 1962 the world waited—seemingly on the brink of nuclear war—and hoped for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    

   So, we all felt very vulnerable from all of this. I was 8 years old in 1956 and we were trained to "Duck and Cover". Sometimes the girls cried when we had to do this but the boys usually had "Gallows Humor" like the soldiers did in World War II and said things like, "Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye" and then we would laugh and the tension of thinking about dying as children would be broken.

    

   "Duck and cover is pretending in school we were being nuked and climbing under our desks, covered our heads with our arms to protect us from the windows exploding inwards during a nuclear blast. But, we knew in reality likely we would first melt and then explode and then blow away in the wind as dust. WE all knew this and lived with this as children every day growing up. And there was no relief at all from October 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis to Kennedy, his brother and Martin Luther King being assassinated until about 1990 when the Soviet Union Collapsed in Stages and and Yeltsin created a democracy in Russia.

   
   

   I suppose you could say that from 1917 to 1990 it was a very scary and horrific experience for the U.S. in regard to World War I, The Great Depression, Hitler and Tojo,  The Soviet Union getting nukes, going into space before us, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy being assassinated, Viet nam that killed 250,000 people mostly my age (more people were killed my specific age than any other age during that war). So, I have always taken this very personally. And losing Kennedy was also a very personal loss for every American as well.

   
   

   There was much more trust in government until Kennedy was assassinated. But, most trust in government telling us the truth left at that point. For example, 61% of the American public still believes that more than one person was in involved in the Assassination of President Kennedy today which is the lowest level of belief of that since it happened. IN regard to people I personally knew all intelligent people didn't believe Oswald did it alone, especially when Ruby killed Oswald a day later or so. So, it is likely that somewhere between 70% and 90% of the people believed there was some kind of conspiracy. I don't think people would have turned against the Viet Nam War like they did if they weren't so suspicious of our government and who actually was running things after they killed Kennedy.

   
   

   The biggest changes in Americans that I can describe is in the 1950s anyone could or would tell you exactly what they thought. There wasn't the severe repression of people's ideas and thoughts like there is today. Children could carry toy weapons then around and play with them without any danger of someone shooting them unless they were actually carrying out a robbery with a toy weapon.

   
   

   So, the U.S. has become a much more repressive society and people have many less rights now than they did in the 1950s. So, we have returned to a place a lot like people were at around 1900 to about 1929 where money was also concentrated in only a few people at the top. It took the Great Depression and World War II to change this along with the advent of many many unions to create a middle class. But the middle class has now been dying since the union busting of Reagan starting in the 1980s.

   
   

   So, as the rights of the American People dwindle both directly and indirectly I fear we are moving further and further from any America we have known before.

   
   

   However, paradoxically, we likely are moving towards either a world war that will incinerate all or most people or take us towards a one world government that could be either desirable or undesirable depending upon who you are worldwide.

   
   

   If you study the history of the last 113 years you can see how all this has moved forwards. What to me is amazing is that we haven't nuked ourselves out of existence already given the way everyone was all along the way.

   
   

   The extreme polarization of the 1950s and 1960s was just so extreme at that time that there was a mistrust between the people over 30 and those under 30. I think the breakwater was the death of Kennedy. So, the older generation's slogan was "America. Love it or Leave it" But, in the end that is like saying, "We aren't going to say anything as America drives off a cliff and kills us all". So, America love it or leave it many of us as educated people just saw as a completely insane statement in itself. So, though most of us completely valued loyalty we weren't stupid either.

   
   

   So, the main thing that separated educated Baby Boomers from the older generation then was that we were more into thinking things through and logical and reasonable and less just blindly loyal to things that made no sense to us at all.

   
   

   And during the 1960s and 1970s this separated many many families apart young from old that some never spoke to each other again during their lifetimes.

   
   

   My family was not like this but I knew other families that were. So, often young or old or both died with broken hearts from all this. But, this was the worst it got since the Civil War in the mid 1800s. So, instead of a bloody battle between different groups this war was a social revolution and it broke many hearts on both sides of this Social revolution battle. The country still hasn't fully recovered to this day from all the changes and may never.

   
   

   So, the main ways people have changed from then is what I would call "political correctness" which basically means, "You can no longer say what you think or feel in public or someone might die like they used to here in the U.S. when people actually said what they felt."

   
   

   So, from this point of view political correctness is basically "telling lies so nobody dies"

   which is a variation of diplomacy that has been used by all nations to prevent wars.

    

   I would say the main problem with Political Correctness is it tends to create "Mass Murderers". 

    

   And likely this will get worse until people can once again say what they think in public.

    

   Society dealt with these problems before but but in less humane ways but is now is completely unprepared now because of the forced dishonesty of Political correctness. 

   
   

   So, I would say the present problems in the U.S. biggest cause is "Political Correctness". When you can no longer tell the truth the country collapses which is where we are now.

   
   

   Because the United States always has been based upon "Majority Rule" and telling the Truth. 

   
   

   When people can't tell the truth there can be no majority rule either.

   
   

   This is a part of my experience of what life has been and what it is now 63 years after I turned 2 in 1950.