Before Political Correctness

The easiest time to recall for me before political correctness which took hold through politiicans and colleges here in the U.S. during the 1980s is the 1950s and very early 1960s.

It was a different kind of paradoxical time than the one we live in now.

What was markedly different than now is that racist views were normal and you would often hear people speak this way in public, on the TV etc. Also, there was a hysteria over Soviet Russia where ideas like "Better Dead than Red" were often spoken where it was advocated that we destroy the whole world rather than be "taken over by communism". So, there was a lot of terror in the air generally speaking. Also, people were not as polite as they are today and violence was much more common on the streets between families and different groups of people than now.

However, the big difference would be that people didn't use guns like they do now very much. It was considered "dishonorable" to settle your differences with a gun or machine gun. So, only really hardened criminals like the Mafia or bank robbers tended to use guns. If people were in a gang and were teenagers mostly they had knives, switchblades, pipes, chains, clubs or anything that they could hurt someone with, but generally it was thought "unmanly" to carry guns if you were in gangs then.

So, even though there was more violence then than now, less people died on the streets generally speaking than now.

There was a lot more "very heated communication" between people. So, differences sometimes were settled enough with minor violence rather than killing people like the way things are now.

So, people were scared but we didn't kill each other very much but many people were maimed in the violence a lot more than now.

Whereas now people aren't maimed, there is no communication at all and when people get angry they just kill each other.

So, there wasn't the extreme polarization that there is now. We had all just been in World War II and we were literally very aware that All of us just fought in a really really tough war. So, in this sense we were one country much more than now. We all had barely survived world war II so we were one country.

This isn't true anymore. People right now are very polarized like they were in the 1920s. It's sort of like instead of being one country right now we are maybe 100 different countries because we  haven't had  enough of a threat to galvanize us around, nor are we likely to have that kind of threat ever again because of Nuclear weapons.

So, normal (for thousands of years) conflicts cannot exist without destroying all life on earth.

So, things are extremely out of balance historically and are liable to become more and more aberrant over the ongoing years because of nuclear weapons and the Internet and globalization.