Easy Times Hard Times?

There really are no easy times. Even when the average person was much richer here in America during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, times were harder than now in some ways. You might say, "Why is this?" The best answer I can give would be that people had become so used to really really hard times from the crash of 1929 until the end of World War II, that when it ended and the Cold War began they still felt they weren't out of the woods from  starving to death or being killed (900,000) Americans along with millions permanently maimed physically, mentally and emotional scarred for life that everyone sort of was in shock especially in the 1950s. By the 1960s the older generations were horrified by my generation, having never seen World War II (we were born during or after it) and all our privileged thinking. So, when we demanded that the Viet Nam War end and we demanded equal rights for women and minorities they killed many of us for being ungrateful. But, it wasn't that we were ungrateful, it was that we saw clearly what they couldn't yet because of all their many wounds from the Great Depression and World War II.

So, even when financially(what they could buy for an hour of work) the average person had it much better than the average person does today there were still problems to be overcome, there were still wrongs to be righted. So, even today when jobs are the problem and there are still about 12 million people out of work here in the U.S. with more graduating from College and High School every 6 months or so looking for work too they have many rights that people in the 1950s and 1960s didn't have, like staying alive and not being discriminated against for being a woman or a minority whether that minority was the color of someone's skin, an ethnicity or even a religion that wasn't widely known of or accepted.

So, even in the very best of times when everyone had enough food and enough jobs from the 1950s to about 1980 there were not enough rights accepted yet for people to be happy enough to feel good about themselves. Now people have enough rights there aren't enough jobs to go around but at least they are much less likely to be killed for being different in some ways than they were in the 1950s and 1960s.