The 1950s were much more frightening than now

Why?

First of all, as a child it seemed like someone I knew was dying every week or so. Whether it was an adult from church who was afraid of doctors or whether it was someone I knew of from TV or whether it was a child at school or kids dying of polio or a host of other things or whether it was kids flying through windows in traffic accidents because people didn't have car seats for kids or seat belts just yet. Well, I knew people who had seat belts and some actually wore them but they were only about 1% of the people I knew and likely very intelligent more intellectual people. So, almost every week teenagers would be in a jalopy racing and they would be found in trees or bloody on pavements from racing down the road at over 100 mph with no safety devices or seat belts. This was pretty normal in the 1950s. or people would die in gang knife and club fights or they would race cars and die that way too by killing themselves and bystanders or people in other cars or on the street. This was pretty normal stuff in the 1950s by the way.

But then, on top of all this there were hydrogen bombs so that people would threaten us like 

Nikita Khrushchev - Wikipedia

  Nikita Khrushchev and pound his shoe on the table and say things like: "We will bury you'  Americans and the western world". So, all this kind of stuff like Americans with signs saying "Better Dead than Red" which basically meant that human extinction was better than being a communist which is still how our American military is set up with Doomsday weapons still today. So, because of all this it was pretty terrifying growing up in the 1950s much more scary than today just from nukes.