part of the political issue is that popular understanding of mid century america is filtered through nostalgia-drenched popular culture, often through stories told from the perspective of a child or, if not a child, an affluent adult
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And definitely not Black, brown, Jewish, or gay folks. Or women, none of whom had the rights that cisgender white Christian men had. However, they did have UNIONS. That's the main thing we need to bring back from the mid-20th century! (Unions that don't exclude women and minorities, that is.)
apr 8, 2025, 2:52 pm • 18 0 • view
My grandmother was born in the early 1900s and talked about all the neighbors that died during the Spanish Flu. Of quitting school after 9th grade to help support the family. How she got an orange for Xmas. She'd tell you those times were shit and that the 50s were also- she was a Dem ward boss.
apr 8, 2025, 2:23 pm • 21 4 • view
One of my grandfathers was a lawyer in the 1950s and they owned their own home -- but couldn't afford to furnish it. Their dining table was literally a picnic table with benches.
apr 8, 2025, 1:23 pm • 35 1 • view
the nigh-universal change in housing prices really makes anecdotes about the past feel strange. My paternal grandfather bought a summer cabin in maine on a minister's salary but my uncle had to fish for breakfast every morning because they couldn't afford food and they scavenged nails at the dump
apr 8, 2025, 1:27 pm • 27 1 • view
Make that a family of seven in a one bedroom home. Father a college grad employed architectural engineer.
apr 8, 2025, 4:55 pm • 0 0 • view
That was my experience growing up. It was just the way it was. I didn’t know anything else
apr 8, 2025, 2:16 pm • 1 0 • view
This is so true
apr 8, 2025, 4:52 pm • 1 0 • view
Apparently, the Gilded Age is being misinterpreted as the Golden Age.
apr 9, 2025, 9:56 am • 0 0 • view
The Wonder Years, in retrospect, might as well have been federally-funded, purpose-designed propaganda.
apr 8, 2025, 1:00 pm • 22 0 • view
Though the Wonder Years was 60s, not 50s (Winnie's brother dies in Vietnam fairly early on)
apr 8, 2025, 1:16 pm • 7 0 • view
The 60s are a time many people see as a Golden Age, and nostalgia/memory/emotions around this kind of stuff isn't very precise about dates and eras. For ex., most people's image of a 50s family is from advertising illustrations, not life. Reality/fact is obscured in a golden haze.
apr 8, 2025, 1:50 pm • 9 1 • view
On this subject, If you haven't read @profhajaryazdiha.bsky.social's amazing Struggle for the People's King--you SHOULD!
apr 8, 2025, 1:09 pm • 8 1 • view
Thank you @fisherdanar.bsky.social!
apr 8, 2025, 11:42 pm • 2 0 • view
apr 8, 2025, 5:06 pm • 1 0 • view
"nice MAGA hat. be a shame if someone... made you go on a road trip in a 1961 Corvair"
apr 8, 2025, 1:03 pm • 10 0 • view
Indoor plumbing is nice, though.
apr 8, 2025, 1:21 pm • 3 0 • view
Yep. People like to romanticize the Don Drapers and Betty Drapers of the period while ignoring the fact that Don was an alcoholic douchebag who got lucky in life and Betty was a repressed housewife, full of rage, who chain-smoked her way to lung cancer.
apr 8, 2025, 1:05 pm • 15 0 • view
Don’t forget the housewives little friend, the little white cross diet pills!
apr 8, 2025, 3:33 pm • 3 0 • view
All I need to be told is this was a pre-Title IX and pre-Civil Rights and related Labor movements era. Everything else is superfluous to me.
apr 8, 2025, 3:58 pm • 0 0 • view
I’m surprised by younger people imagining marriages of the 50s & 60s to be fairytale examples of love and devotion- I’m not sure my grandparents even liked each other.
apr 8, 2025, 1:09 pm • 44 3 • view
or earlier -- my paternal grandmother (only grand who lived long enough for me to know) once told my mom that she knew within a month that she had made a big mistake in marrying my grandfather but that in that time (1920-ish) divorce was unthinkable. I'm selfishly glad for that! Also sad for her.
apr 8, 2025, 4:17 pm • 0 0 • view
My grandfather treated my grandmother like a child and kept her on an extremely strict allowance. Her entire life was cleaning and cooking. She had a psychotic break after their last child left home
apr 8, 2025, 2:13 pm • 18 0 • view
Oof. I came across a Reddit comment that was something like “a man used to work and provide money and, in exchange, his wife gave him unconditional love and emotional support” and the level of naïveté in that comment shook me to my core.
apr 8, 2025, 2:22 pm • 24 0 • view
Yes, I had a slew of people trashing me as a 'boomer' yesterday, saying some version of everything was great until you boomers fucked it all up. We all wish.
apr 8, 2025, 1:25 pm • 2 0 • view
Food sucked in the 1950-60s. TV dinners? Chef Boyardi? Shit coffee? Everything canned. This was followed by the development and onslaught of fast food. Amazing we survived.
apr 8, 2025, 6:03 pm • 1 0 • view
Accurate!!!
apr 8, 2025, 6:45 pm • 0 0 • view
If one has a decent childhood, one always has a fondness and nostalgia for that period of innocence.
apr 8, 2025, 8:42 pm • 0 0 • view
I was on of six kids, about 1300 sq ft, no AC, in the south. Pizza was a once a year luxury.
apr 8, 2025, 4:08 pm • 0 0 • view
A lot of comments here don't ring true to me. I was born in Chicago in the early '50s to (eventually) middle class white parents. They had little money while my Dad was in medical school, paid for by the GI Bill. He worked as a cab driver and we lived in housing project apartments.
apr 8, 2025, 8:06 pm • 0 0 • view
Their finances during his internship, now with a second child, were similarly meager. (If the Pill had existed then, I doubt my sister or I would have been born.) Eventually my parents became more comfortable, but my Dad never chased money and took interesting jobs rather than lucrative ones.
apr 8, 2025, 8:14 pm • 0 0 • view
That's the background. During the 50s and early 60s, it seemed like people could be pretty comfortable without needing much materially. My Mom made at least 1/3 of our, and her own, clothes. We didn't have a TV till later and no electronics. Our house, in a small town by then, was small and plain.
apr 8, 2025, 8:20 pm • 1 0 • view
People didn't go out to eat except sometimes on Sunday after church. If we went to movies, it was at the drive-in. Our furniture was spare. It bugs me that people who didn't live in the 50s are claiming that people who DID are only remembering TV shows. Is that how THEY remember their childhoods?
apr 8, 2025, 8:24 pm • 0 0 • view
True! The Trump supporters I know are lost in the “good old days.” They were better than now but far from perfect. For example: 1968’s unrest & assassinations beat the daylights out of optimism. Watergate ripped off the blinders & Reagan really gave today a send off. How quickly we forget.
apr 8, 2025, 3:53 pm • 0 0 • view
100%. I was a kid in the 80's. I had a great childhood... good parents, grew up on a farm with lots of animals. I literally had a pet goat. What I didn't see/understand was my father's constant anxiety of being at the whims of the weather, paying the farm loan... or being a gay kid or minority.
apr 8, 2025, 1:03 pm • 15 0 • view
Polio, bomb shelters, June Cleaver having more kids than she could handle. Stashed a big bottle of cheap sangria under the sink.
apr 9, 2025, 3:01 am • 0 0 • view
Yep. I grew up in the military. It was tough. Pay was low. Lots of loans were taken out. We didn’t know what a two bath home was till I was in high school. Never had a new car - always used. Life was worse for people of color. And I hear Gen Z saying “why can’t WE have that life?”
apr 8, 2025, 4:42 pm • 1 0 • view
1./ There's some interesting parallels with Japan here. For decades after the war, Japanese movies and TV have frequently told stories of the war from the child's perspective, as if the events of the Pacific War were a brief madness that the Japanese people were not responsible for.
apr 8, 2025, 1:20 pm • 13 0 • view
2./ Stories such as 'Rail of the Star' and 'Grave of the Fireflies' are anti-war, while dodging the question of who the perpetrators were. An awful lot of post-war fiction averts its gaze from the war's causes and simply treats most if not all Japanese as helpless civilians; frames them as infants.
apr 8, 2025, 1:24 pm • 12 0 • view
3./ I also recommend the film 'Twenty Four Eyes', in which a teacher loses her pupils to the war, as another reference. In short, Japan has spent decades averting its eyes from the war's causes. When the Trump era ends, Americans will be busy infantilising themselves. 'We were just victims, too.'
apr 8, 2025, 4:16 pm • 6 0 • view
It was a different time, society had gone through the Great Depression and went right into War all within a 16 year period. Were things simpler in the 1950s yes, prices were still reflective of those 2 situations from the Depression shortages and the wartime rationing.
apr 8, 2025, 11:59 pm • 1 0 • view
We did not have the distractions that exist today. But we still had many of the same issues that exist today. Drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, child abuse existed but did not receive the attention that it does today.
apr 8, 2025, 11:59 pm • 1 0 • view
The only therapy the elders had was "shut up about it." I am an elder in my generation of the family tree, I learned alot just hovering around the adults when they were talking and picking up on the random trauma drops.
apr 8, 2025, 3:15 pm • 0 0 • view
My younger cousins had no idea which auntie/grandma was abused (like 9/10 of them). They had no idea who ran off from home, who had drug habits, why people disappeared or died, etc. The past is a rosey time if you are never presented the full picture.
apr 8, 2025, 3:15 pm • 0 0 • view
This ^^^ I have been saying this for awhile. They want to go back to the way they perceived the world before 1960. Some dream land that we simply can't go back to because......it's 2025. Meanwhile, Musk is in the back trying to AI vault us into the future. WTH?
apr 8, 2025, 1:24 pm • 1 0 • view
Propaganda is the term usually reserved for those kinds of stories.
apr 8, 2025, 5:02 pm • 0 0 • view
I think this a fair point. How many people have you heard comment, myself included, "drove by old house, didn't realize how small it was".
apr 8, 2025, 1:53 pm • 16 0 • view
I lived through that period as a single mom ,3 kids. I earned $ 12,200 per year. I had food stamps to help. Yet! We made it!!!Fuck the good old days..and what came after!!
apr 8, 2025, 1:27 pm • 5 0 • view
Green stamps!
apr 8, 2025, 1:47 pm • 2 0 • view
This was the generation who found a jello-and-cottage-cheese based dish to be a refreshing dessert. It may have tasted so to canned-food palettes :(
apr 8, 2025, 12:59 pm • 18 0 • view
That was more related to the 19th Century - the aristocracy/upper class would have their chefs create these difficult, gelatin-based dishes as a display of wealth. Once Jello and easy-to-use gelatin became widely available, middle-class people went wild for it due to that association.
apr 8, 2025, 1:04 pm • 27 0 • view
We see it as a weird, corny 1950s-ish artifact, but it actually goes back much farther!
apr 8, 2025, 1:04 pm • 19 0 • view
Oh dang, that’s a really neat fact! And makes a lot more sense.
apr 8, 2025, 1:10 pm • 5 0 • view
plus it's part of the process where fancy food is fancy not so much for taste, but for the effort involved in preparing it, and once that disappears, so does the status. The same thing happened with milleues? and the Cusinart
apr 8, 2025, 2:54 pm • 9 0 • view
Jesus, humans throughout history really do be bragging about how much they force other people to do tedious work for them.
apr 8, 2025, 4:18 pm • 4 0 • view
Yes - the more time, labour, skill something requires to make, the more of a boast it is, especially when it's something frivolous, unnecessary, ephemeral. Which is why the flavour of those dishes was a second thought at best. They were a display of wealth first, food second.
apr 8, 2025, 4:47 pm • 4 0 • view
A big reason for this is the dominance of Boomers in many of the institutions that boost this narrative. The ones who support this veneer either fully believe it or were too young to understand it was a facade.
apr 8, 2025, 2:53 pm • 8 0 • view
I was born in the 50's. My dad developed a diasabling medical condition requiring my mother (high school dropout) to work to support him and three kids. She was paid less than the men she worked with for the same job. No safety net. It wasn't pretty - didn't feel like the promised land.
apr 8, 2025, 3:33 pm • 0 0 • view
The Fred Flintstone economy and society
apr 8, 2025, 1:07 pm • 8 1 • view
With the added irony that 'THE FLINTSTONES' was itself a (single-joke) satire: "Look how proud and content these people are of their modern suburban lifestyle and fancy appliances ...and they're CAVEMEN!"
apr 8, 2025, 1:15 pm • 12 2 • view
We also view the happiest, safest times of our lives being childhood, and those nostalgic memories are ‘the good old days’, and different for everyone. Every generation has a golden era..
apr 8, 2025, 11:07 pm • 3 0 • view
So often depicted as spacious rooms appointed with lovely furniture and two occupants at most.
apr 8, 2025, 4:11 pm • 1 0 • view
It also doesn't take into account pollution (the Cuyahoga River caught fire...and not just once) and availability of healthcare (my brother was a juvenile liver transplant patient...in the 50s he'd have died at 5, not 40).
apr 8, 2025, 1:09 pm • 18 1 • view
Love Canal comes to mind.
apr 8, 2025, 1:46 pm • 10 0 • view
Its literally TV shows. Their view of the past is based on TV shows of the time.
apr 8, 2025, 2:04 pm • 1 0 • view
Not to mention an explicitly *white* POV
apr 8, 2025, 1:06 pm • 3 0 • view
My parents lived very much like in your quoted post. I'm 53, so I had the benefit of hearing those stories as a kid, as well as seeing the houses they grew up in. In my dad's case 6 kids and both parents. In my mom's 5 kids and one parent. They shared bedrooms until they moved out.
apr 8, 2025, 5:36 pm • 0 0 • view
As for "marriages lasted" well, clearly my mom's parents' didn't. Nor did one of her sisters' husband's. In fact he had to get the shotgun out to tell his abusive father never to return... He tried. He was met with the shotgun a second time. (Never fired.) Sounds like an awful time to me...
apr 8, 2025, 5:36 pm • 0 0 • view
If I recall correctly the first time he did that was age 12, then again 2 years later at 14. No kid should have to do that. But it was for the survival of his mom, and siblings. So he stepped up even though it could have escalated. (Thankfully it didn't.)
apr 8, 2025, 5:38 pm • 0 0 • view
Either that or marketing.
apr 8, 2025, 1:42 pm • 1 0 • view
Also the nostalgia is based on how rapidly the standard of living improved from the early part of the 20th century. The 1950s and 1960s would have felt almost utopian for someone whose formative years were the Great Depression and WWII!
apr 8, 2025, 12:59 pm • 92 3 • view
Exactly. My grandparents were raised in the Dust Bowl during the Depression. They each had 1-2 sets of clothes and 1 pair of shoes. Their children having 5 outfits and not worrying about food made them feel like they had everything.
apr 8, 2025, 2:52 pm • 1 0 • view
I'm a millenial with greatest gen grandparents (all passed in the 90s) and they had deep, deep trauma when it came to food and food security. My grandfather would insist you eat *everything* he served. Didn't matter if you were full. Didn't matter if you'd just eaten. Didn't matter if you felt sick
apr 8, 2025, 1:06 pm • 68 1 • view
Oh man totally, in my experience to an insane degree. I remember 2 incidents where I refused to eat something legitimately gross (1. liver, 2. mushy canned peas), & family members made me sit there at the half eaten plate while yelling at me, refusing to let me get up. Super weird. Totally lost it.
apr 8, 2025, 7:42 pm • 1 0 • view
My Pops once forced my aunt to eat a bologna sandwich she threw under a porch to avoid eating it for lunch. Served it to her, dirt and all, for dinner. This was relayed to me as a funny anecdote.
apr 8, 2025, 7:58 pm • 0 0 • view
My grandfather wouldn’t let my grandmother make a long distance phone call in the 1990’s. Not that he was a controlling abusive man (he most definitely wasn’t) it was all about the cost. Grandma saved tinfoil and ziplocks.
apr 8, 2025, 4:01 pm • 2 0 • view
I'm a young Xer. Grandparents born 26 and 28 (died 10 and 23) in rural areas fit that description perfectly. My wife grew up in "terrorist bombings in the city with a side of economic depression" 80s Peru, and is the only other person I've seen even come close to them on that attitude. Awful trauma.
apr 8, 2025, 2:53 pm • 2 0 • view
A lot of people forget that the '50s and '60s were the first time in the Western world that the average person could conceive of having *disposable income*.
apr 8, 2025, 1:14 pm • 55 3 • view
YES! This book shows it all— I think he covers 1851 to 1951? I read it several years ago, but it was SO good: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/20575/...
apr 8, 2025, 1:55 pm • 0 0 • view
I know it's set in England and we don't have a comparable social safety net, but Ethel & Ernest really shows the insane trajectory of the 20th century.
apr 8, 2025, 1:28 pm • 17 1 • view
Worth the $3.99 I’m about to pay to rent.
apr 8, 2025, 6:57 pm • 4 0 • view
It's a good movie! But it's also a graphic novel, and your library might have it (mine did).
apr 8, 2025, 6:58 pm • 5 0 • view
The real struggle now is between empathy and impunity. The impunity assholes think the 50's and 60's were great because they could ensure black people couldn't live in their neighborhood and women had no independence. Trump is impunity personified.
apr 8, 2025, 1:06 pm • 12 0 • view
The Country was so close to putting all the inequality behind us. Then the dark political money flooded our Parties and took power away from the Citizens. Money and Lust for Power corruption.☮️ Check the Chart to see how Citizens no longer seem to have a say!
apr 9, 2025, 3:19 am • 3 0 • view
That and Jim Crow laws let's make America more racist more again.
apr 8, 2025, 8:05 pm • 1 0 • view
My FIL was born, dirt-poor, in 1929. Up until his death 12 years ago when ANYONE talked about the “good old days” in his hearing he would fix them with a gimlet eye and say firmly, “THESE are the good old days!!” He was so grateful his sons never experienced the grinding poverty he knew so well.
apr 8, 2025, 3:54 pm • 3 0 • view
Just read a passage about this exact thing in a sci fi book I’m working through twenty five years after I first read it
apr 8, 2025, 6:49 pm • 1 0 • view
Aside from perspective we don't have due to technological advances, we tiptoe around the word "propaganda" too much. The older I get, the more I realize that our propaganda is on level, if not better than, that of any other nation on earth. Just a different flavor, is all.
apr 8, 2025, 3:36 pm • 1 0 • view
Seems related to the belief that the international order that made us the richest country on Earth is unfair to Americans. I don't know how they're related. Some ideas: 1. It was easier to get by on any job back then. 2. Inequality is more glaring now. 3. Social media shows us rich foreigners now.
apr 8, 2025, 1:30 pm • 4 0 • view
My parents grew up in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s in middle class white families. Both of their mothers were college educated and worked. My mother was college educated and worked. Same with most of my friends’ families. Leave it to Beaver is fictional.
apr 8, 2025, 1:02 pm • 6 0 • view
I’m excited for them to learn about the closet space they get when we go back to the 50s!
apr 8, 2025, 1:27 pm • 13 0 • view
Reminds me of that scene from Fargo www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMsn...
apr 8, 2025, 11:36 pm • 10 3 • view
Back when everyone was skinny and fit, since they weren't eating a bunch of artificial foods* *Plus all the methamphetamines and benzodiazepines
apr 8, 2025, 1:04 pm • 12 0 • view
My mother complains about this often. She didn’t particularly enjoy the 50’s.
apr 8, 2025, 6:22 pm • 3 0 • view
I remember all the mothers trying to hide their depression. Oppression everywhere you looked.
apr 8, 2025, 1:01 pm • 23 1 • view
This!! Manfluencers ranting about women today taking SSRIs, but blissfully unaware an entire generation of homemakers in the 60s and 70s were addicted to Valium
apr 8, 2025, 4:00 pm • 1 0 • view
Yup. My mother spent much of my childhood in bed, addicted to Valium.
apr 8, 2025, 3:55 pm • 1 0 • view
As an NBA fan it's a very familiar phenomenon - past players are known as highlight reels and fuzzy legends, current ones are judged on full games and ways they've fallen short.
apr 8, 2025, 1:58 pm • 3 0 • view
So true
apr 9, 2025, 1:12 am • 0 0 • view
The ht of luxury is still enough bathrooms in the house for the inhabitants (1:4 would've bn nice) imho
apr 8, 2025, 1:06 pm • 0 0 • view
cf. Peanuts!!!
apr 8, 2025, 2:42 pm • 0 0 • view
The advent of mass media & putting TVs & radios in homes created faux middle-class standards. Most Moms didn't wear pearls every day. Many Dads worked in factories & came home filthy & drunk. They may not have divorced but ppl had affairs & abandoned their families. Some ppl just disappeared.
apr 8, 2025, 1:34 pm • 7 0 • view
So TRUE!
apr 9, 2025, 5:41 am • 0 0 • view
Nostalgia is one hell of a drug
apr 9, 2025, 1:23 pm • 0 0 • view
As an architect...average house size was like 800-900sf. For all families. Plus all the bigotry and oppression. And, the top tax rate was around 90%!!! 30% of labor was unionized. The ignorance is astonishing.
apr 8, 2025, 3:46 pm • 0 0 • view
One bathroom. No golden toilets. Everyone else’s shower took too long.
apr 8, 2025, 3:51 pm • 1 0 • view
I keep going back to the Hays Code, which mandated this rose-colored pop culture view that people now most closely associate with “the good ol’ days” — days that, as you point out, never existed for the vast majority of folks Makes me wonder how long til we get a new Hays Code
apr 8, 2025, 1:31 pm • 12 2 • view
Everybody thinks it was all so "Opie Taylor" in Mayberry and/or everyone's dad was an architect.
apr 8, 2025, 3:59 pm • 0 0 • view
The Spielberg Effect
apr 8, 2025, 3:31 pm • 1 0 • view
I've been telling people to watch old Roseanne. Mandatory overtime & sudden hour cuts, juggling bills, her back being fucked up from factory work. Malcolm in the Middle too. We need more representation like that. Instead we have Kardashians.
apr 8, 2025, 2:23 pm • 27 3 • view
Doubt you'll see that kind of representation from linear television. They're scraping the bottom of the barrel to grab eyeballs. (a friend told me there's some sort of incest based show out there now).
apr 8, 2025, 4:10 pm • 0 0 • view
I mean I grew up watching Al Bundy support a stay at home mom and two teenagers on a show salesman's budget. The best comedies of the last few years focused on real people too like Abbott Elementary.
apr 8, 2025, 4:34 pm • 1 0 • view
We need Rosanne herself to watch her own show!
apr 8, 2025, 5:33 pm • 6 2 • view
It's interesting how John Goodman went on to play like 5 versions of The Embodiment Of American Evil but Roseanne became it IRL lol
apr 8, 2025, 6:33 pm • 5 0 • view
Yes the average American did not have Don Draper's standard of living.
apr 8, 2025, 1:54 pm • 3 0 • view
Exactly. My Grandparents raised three children and their dog in a one bathroom 1300 sq ft home. Everybody was happy. Rich with love.
apr 8, 2025, 5:03 pm • 0 0 • view
Capitalism also realized that women's lib was good for them, embraced employing women, then stagnated pay so that eventually both people HAVE to work to support a family
apr 8, 2025, 6:36 pm • 0 0 • view
You just wrote my biography. In my case it involved a stay at home mother who didn’t even know how to drive & got beat up by a drunk husband routinely.
apr 8, 2025, 7:06 pm • 0 0 • view
Mid century America also looks pretty nice after act two when that child grows up and gets sent to fight in Vietnam.
apr 8, 2025, 1:04 pm • 3 0 • view
I just don’t get this sudden zeal for a future filled with factory work
apr 8, 2025, 9:21 pm • 8 0 • view
Then there's the really awkward bit about being nostalgic for the 50's - forgetting/ignoring that the civil rights act wasn't signed until 1964 & the voting rights act the year after. And marriage equality didn't happen until 2015.
apr 8, 2025, 5:27 pm • 1 0 • view
We had a small house, food as described above, clothing from Kmart, used cars. Vacations were camping trips, Disneyland twice in my entire childhood and we drove to LA. We rode our bikes to the store for vinyl records bought with allowance and babysitting $. Spartan by today’s standards.
apr 8, 2025, 4:38 pm • 0 0 • view
We had ONE pair of shoes, maybe two if you went to church. You wore those shoes until you outgrew them or they fell apart. Same with clothing. A few kids came from families with money but that was by far the exception. We grew up understanding how it feels to be poor.
apr 8, 2025, 4:58 pm • 0 0 • view
And knowing how it feels to be poor gave at least some of us compassion for those still in poverty. We also fought for women’s rights, reproductive freedom, civil rights. Not all Boomers lost their way.
apr 8, 2025, 5:02 pm • 1 0 • view
The halcyon days when I wasn’t the grown up in charge of making it work
apr 9, 2025, 6:52 am • 0 0 • view
“BUT WOMEN WERE SILENCED? BLACK PEOPLE WERE SILENCED! QUEERS WERE SILENCED! WE COULD DO VIOLENCE ON KIDS WITH NO SHAME! WE MUST GO BAAAACK!” That’s the truth of it for them
apr 8, 2025, 5:51 pm • 3 0 • view
There is no point in history I would want to go “back to”. While I enjoy music, art and fashion of different eras, the reality of life is such that quality of life and lifespans worldwide are better now than in the past (except in war torn areas and under dictatorships). Send me to the future.
apr 8, 2025, 5:50 pm • 0 0 • view
In the 50s and 60s, grandma patched our jeans and darned the holes in our socks. A treat was once a month going to McDonald’s for a 15 cent hamburger. You had a church outfit, your school clothes and your cruddies. You wore your tennis shoes until they had holes in them and they fell apart.
apr 8, 2025, 3:17 pm • 11 0 • view
"You know what nostalgia is, don't you? It's basically a matter of recalling the fun without reliving the pain." ~ Bette Davis
apr 8, 2025, 2:03 pm • 6 0 • view
It's funny I look at the family in "A Christmas Story," which apparently is set in 1940, and it's really surprising how primitive everything is for what appears to be a middle class family.
apr 8, 2025, 2:08 pm • 5 0 • view
I love that movie because it looks like my neighborhood when i was a kid.We were actually a little poorer than them because of alcoholism.
apr 8, 2025, 3:39 pm • 2 0 • view
Yes!
apr 8, 2025, 2:26 pm • 0 0 • view
Most of these Good Old Days/RETVRN types (depending on your age range) also have a skewed view of the past that's wholly based on media products like sitcoms and ads It's a golden age that never existed outside of a poorly scanned magazine liquor ad that's been posted to Reddit!
apr 8, 2025, 2:27 pm • 18 1 • view
Correct and a bunch of nonsense. Good old days my behind.
apr 8, 2025, 2:45 pm • 0 0 • view
In some classes, I have students read _The Way We Never Were_ and their minds are blown. 85% of the population (overall) wasn't Ozzie & Harriet, but that's what they want to sell us. It's a persistent myth.
apr 9, 2025, 6:29 pm • 1 0 • view
I'm not sure people really understand what it's like to live in a world where poor folks can't send their kids to high school because they need the income from the kid's factory job. I'm sure the men felt very masculine though, so there's that.
apr 9, 2025, 8:10 am • 2 0 • view
Also! The top tax rate was 90%.
apr 8, 2025, 4:54 pm • 2 0 • view
My nostalgia is for the relative innocence of the time, but little else.
apr 8, 2025, 4:10 pm • 0 0 • view
The most toxic kind of nostalgia …
apr 9, 2025, 12:34 pm • 0 0 • view
And one bathroom and one car (if you’re lucky)!
apr 9, 2025, 3:24 am • 1 0 • view
If America had ever written down its real history, people might’ve learned something.
apr 9, 2025, 12:41 am • 4 2 • view
Accurate
apr 8, 2025, 10:59 pm • 0 0 • view
They also conveniently ignore the fact that businesses and the wealthy were taxed more and the government funded things for the public good including low interest mortgage rates.
apr 8, 2025, 1:27 pm • 6 0 • view
Years ago I knew a 95 year old woman who cleared me of any preconceptions. "The fifties were miserable. The country was so full of itself at having won the war, and tried to put everyone in their place. You [as a woman] were expected to behave a certain way. It was miserable."
apr 8, 2025, 4:13 pm • 18 0 • view
Our view of the 1950s is a combination of what TV and film producers in the 70s thought the 50s were like, what TV and film producers of the 50s wanted to portray as ideal and what the news media of the 50s wanted people to know about the then present.
apr 8, 2025, 6:35 pm • 0 0 • view
people need to ask themselves why their particular "golden age" corresponds with their childhood, when people were taking care of them
apr 8, 2025, 3:25 pm • 2 0 • view
More specifically, from the perspective of a white child or white affluent adult.
apr 8, 2025, 4:57 pm • 0 0 • view
We were often 8 kids wearing identical clothes because mom got a bolt of some heinous fabric on sale. Good times!
apr 9, 2025, 12:25 pm • 1 0 • view
Got into a major argument with my younger brother about this because he grew up when things were better.
apr 8, 2025, 1:27 pm • 1 0 • view
My childhood memories are absolutely full of being bullied mercilessly for not being Christian, by neighborhood kids, kids at school, and teachers.
apr 8, 2025, 3:13 pm • 0 0 • view
If you watch old movies, people have nostalgia for hobos, but they also currently hate the unhoused.
apr 8, 2025, 2:21 pm • 3 0 • view
indeed it was - & one car
apr 8, 2025, 9:10 pm • 0 0 • view
Or from what was on TV.
apr 8, 2025, 3:04 pm • 0 0 • view
And that's also a deeply white privilege view of life back then. It wasn't so for a large percentage of the population.
apr 8, 2025, 4:48 pm • 0 0 • view
Films lot to answer for. Sold memes: i.e 50's'middel class homes: happy wife & kids, whiteware & maid. 70's' 80's' hard but fair tough guy hero. 90's' new wave liberalism. Life was so much more complicated for all the memes, there was a gritty reality. Images fantasy, but we remember & rely on them.
apr 8, 2025, 1:31 pm • 5 0 • view
yes, and also a much higher tax rate for wealthiest which helped finance those things that provided infrastructure, and VA loans, etc.
apr 8, 2025, 10:48 pm • 1 0 • view
It’s like me growing up in the 90s. I can tell my kids it was a wondrous time filled with Saturday morning cartoons, family trips, and Batman. But, I wasn’t working the two jobs my dad was and stressing about making the rent. I was just living.
apr 8, 2025, 3:20 pm • 0 0 • view
I have nostalgia for my childhood, but I'm not under any pretense that the post-9/11 Bush years were some golden age we need to return to. Like, maybe what you miss is *being* a child, Kevin.
apr 8, 2025, 3:30 pm • 1 1 • view
1950's my dad had a 40-mile paper route through Burbank and Glendale, (Iongest route at Hearst's Herald), LA police were racist thugs, when a teacher named Pappy organized a bus tour for these Cali kids, they were run out of a southern town b/c the local sheriff thought they were freedom riders. . .
apr 8, 2025, 8:12 pm • 0 0 • view
And my dad and his buddies would sit in the playground talking about whether they'd get a chance for a scholarship to play football before the next war saw them drafted, 'cause no way in hell these working class boys could pay for college without help, while LA had atomic dawns via NV bomb tests.
apr 8, 2025, 8:12 pm • 0 0 • view
With radiation blanketing parts of the southwest and points east. And, and. And these guys were lucky. They were caucasian or sort of so. If you weren't, your deal was tougher. Full stop.
apr 8, 2025, 8:12 pm • 0 0 • view
It's also worth noting that the earlier era was one in which the handicapped and mentally ill were basically discarded, either institutionalized or paupers. Also: full employment is easy when you have a draft removing able-bodied men from the workforce.
apr 8, 2025, 1:02 pm • 30 2 • view
Look at how RFK Jr’s aunt was treated, and how he is treating the country in turn. He took all of the wrong lessons from Rosemary’s lobotomy.
apr 8, 2025, 3:15 pm • 11 1 • view
Are you trying to tell me that Fonzie, Potsie, Ralph Malph didn't love the factory jobs they got after graduating high school?
apr 8, 2025, 1:03 pm • 4 0 • view
Fonzie was a mechanic and I bet Potsie and Ralph ended up working at a bank or something like that.
apr 8, 2025, 1:08 pm • 3 0 • view
Selling insurance or Chevys for a living.
apr 8, 2025, 3:30 pm • 0 0 • view
Also wifi in those days was spotty and videogame graphics were awfully blocky.
apr 8, 2025, 3:47 pm • 0 0 • view
I have come to the conclusion that there are almost no adults left in the US. This is a culture of spoiled children. They are hot house orchids, who believe that the world is orderly due to some kind of magic they deserve, rather than from the hard dedicated work of competent moral grownups.
apr 8, 2025, 9:56 pm • 8 0 • view
I always got my understanding of that era filtered through cheeky girls in poodle skirts who hung out at the malt shop but still had teeny tiny waists...
apr 8, 2025, 1:46 pm • 2 0 • view
the '80s really did a number here, not only by having nostalgia for the '50s (a la American Graffiti in '73), but actually making it into a marketable aesthetic which has basically remained a more or less relevant consumer style ever since
apr 8, 2025, 1:00 pm • 77 3 • view
Great episode of American Dad on this subject! LOL! American Dad Graffito.
apr 8, 2025, 6:52 pm • 0 0 • view
Don't forget Back to the Future where they travel back to 1955
apr 8, 2025, 1:07 pm • 38 0 • view
Hard to forget as we're in Back To The Future II right now.
apr 8, 2025, 1:43 pm • 4 0 • view
Back to the Future, one of the great works of American conservative pop art, in which 1955 is exposed as sexier and more debauched than typically presented, but also the fork in the road for white American virility... was top of mind
apr 8, 2025, 1:11 pm • 41 1 • view
and Happy Days it's right there in the name
apr 8, 2025, 2:03 pm • 15 0 • view
Ya…folks basically elected a reality tv character from the 2000s to bring them back to the ‘Happy Days’ they imagined via a 1970s sitcom.
apr 8, 2025, 2:45 pm • 24 2 • view
Happy Days started in 1974 which is kinda funny, like we're going all the way back to 20 years ago when we were so happy. Saved By the Bell was the 80s but ripped off the HD model, all the teens go to a diner after school. Like who did that? The teens from Happy Days did.
apr 8, 2025, 2:13 pm • 7 0 • view
and I grew up in NY. I went to diners growing up all the time, but not like that.
apr 8, 2025, 2:13 pm • 2 0 • view
this is actually the thing i'm talking about. where a slightly more natural post-60s nostalgia became, essentially, an aesthetic mode of consumption.
apr 8, 2025, 2:21 pm • 5 0 • view
There was something I was reading a year or two ago about the invention of teenagers. Teens as a concept didn't really exist until post war. Then they get a little money, a little freedom, Elvis, and all of a sudden there's a culture. There's fun clothes, merchandise, music, movies. None of that...
apr 8, 2025, 2:30 pm • 7 0 • view
existed before the WW2. Teens weren't marketed too, as a group. So, yeah, what you're saying, this aesthetic of consumption begins there, gets smoothed out over the 60s, and we've been kind of mining the same gold since.
apr 8, 2025, 2:35 pm • 8 0 • view
don't really know the exact point i'm trying to make, but there's something insidious about it, like a photocopy of a photocopy, what was real (teens get independence, maybe don't have to work in a sweatshop for the rest of their life, cool leather jackets), gets blurred (mom always made dinner)
apr 8, 2025, 2:40 pm • 6 0 • view
As I said above, what we think the fifties were is a combination of what TV and film producers in the 70s and 80s thought the 50s were like, what TV and film producers of the 50s wanted to portray as ideal and what the news media of the 50s wanted people to know about the then present.
apr 8, 2025, 6:36 pm • 24 1 • view
I'm watching Perry Mason and, while I wouldn't call it realistic or grimy, it really shows a different view of the '50s than the nostalgia filter we have. I also don't know why conservatives want to get rid of no fault divorce because wives be killing husbands all the time in the show.
apr 8, 2025, 2:54 pm • 11 0 • view
“But think how nice and docile all those tv housewives were” …except for Lucy Ricardo and Alice Kramden.
apr 8, 2025, 6:39 pm • 2 0 • view
Lot harder to get away with that now.
apr 9, 2025, 7:40 am • 0 0 • view
True but also dead is dead.
apr 9, 2025, 3:12 pm • 0 0 • view
apr 9, 2025, 3:15 pm • 1 0 • view
American Graffiti in particular has aged especially poorly. Just wall to wall misogyny and catcalling. I hated it as a kid, but didn’t remember why; but watching it again helped figure it out.
apr 8, 2025, 9:25 pm • 0 0 • view
Although he annoys me now, #BillMaher once said something that stuck with me: Democrats love America like adults love their parents—able to see the flaws, but still love them. Conservatives, on the other hand, love America as a child loves their parents—uncritically, almost in a kind of fantasy.
apr 8, 2025, 6:52 pm • 0 0 • view
They remember old tv shows as if they were history. Leave it to beaver, the waltons, etc
apr 8, 2025, 1:04 pm • 4 0 • view
“Leave it to Beaver” was a fictional show about a fictional white Golden Age. Boomer MAGAs think it was real because they were too young to know the difference.
apr 8, 2025, 2:20 pm • 3 0 • view
People also don't understand that the baseline was so much less comfortable. Even the extremely wealthy by that eras standards did not have 1/10th the comfort I have as a lower middle class college dropout. They will never take air conditioning from me while I breathe.
apr 8, 2025, 1:01 pm • 209 6 • view
What the extremely wealthy want is for us all to accept the old fashioned baseline as "just the way it is" while they consume wealth black hole style.You can feel it in the right's rhetoric: prepare for a rollback to a world of physical suffering (with all the productivity of a modern worker).
apr 8, 2025, 5:53 pm • 3 0 • view
this is a really good point.
apr 8, 2025, 1:03 pm • 69 0 • view
My wifi router died this morning, and I'm wandering around the house with just my phone and thinking "is this what death is like?"
apr 8, 2025, 1:10 pm • 9 0 • view
No, it's worse than death. People accuse me of being a Treatler but I'm Treatrick Henry
apr 8, 2025, 1:12 pm • 3 0 • view
Truth
apr 8, 2025, 5:03 pm • 0 0 • view
apr 8, 2025, 3:12 pm • 2 0 • view
My grandparent’s house in CT was built in the 1930s and earned an architectural award for being designed to effectively catch breeze and move it through the house to help keep it cool in summer. AC didn’t exist.
apr 8, 2025, 1:38 pm • 10 0 • view
dont think it gets talked about enough how theres a generation or two that just... believes things they are told. everything was anecdotal, so being the first to put something in their head that seems plausible still has incredible value. my mom still repeats things an aunt wrongly told her in 1964.
apr 8, 2025, 1:17 pm • 6 0 • view
This drives me a bit crazy about my mom. I've been hearing her say the same kinds of stuff since the early 80s, which is often dominated by the bog standard "conventional wisdom that's been disproved for decades." And who would she have heard it from to begin? The family members she says were awful!
apr 8, 2025, 3:09 pm • 2 0 • view
We only got my mom to stop washing chicken this year!
apr 8, 2025, 6:01 pm • 1 0 • view
Rewatched Lizzie McGuire a few years ago and realized she lived an upper middle class life. Her childhood was not the childhood of a majority of Americans.
apr 8, 2025, 7:27 pm • 0 0 • view
The era also saw child neglect and abuse swept under the rug. I know about specific instances of this.
apr 8, 2025, 9:03 pm • 0 0 • view
I'll add... "an affluent WHITE MALE adult"
apr 8, 2025, 1:48 pm • 4 0 • view
It's also just basic human psychology that we tend to forget the bad and remember the good. Nobody would ever want to give birth twice otherwise.
apr 9, 2025, 3:15 pm • 0 0 • view
As a mid-century boomer, I can assure you that not many would opt to return to the reality of the 50's. The contrast in material comforts of the 50's vs. 2025 are many and varied. Strict gender roles drove people to valium and drink. And hiding under desks from nuke attacks was a fun game for kids!
apr 8, 2025, 1:31 pm • 7 0 • view
As my father used to say, “The good thing about the good ole’ days is it’s good they’re gone!”
apr 8, 2025, 7:39 pm • 2 0 • view
Or the late 19th century - Trump’s fave period - when average life expectancy for American males was 42–44 years and females was 44–46 years. This was mainly due to high infant and child mortality rates, limited medical knowledge, poor sanitation, and the lack of antibiotics - RFK Jr’s ideal.
apr 8, 2025, 10:12 pm • 2 0 • view
epidemics such as diphtheria often wiped out entire families' children. Infectious diseases accounted for so many deaths back then. Now we worry about cancer: a disease of mostly old people.
apr 9, 2025, 3:57 am • 1 0 • view
The ousted president of Harvard: has anyone checked to see if she's stopped laughing at Bill Ackman?
apr 8, 2025, 7:24 pm • 0 0 • view
People need to read all the Ramona Quimby books. They are the mid century we are supposed to find nostalgic. They are actually an adhd girl and her family dealing with a lot of shit.
apr 8, 2025, 12:58 pm • 66 2 • view
I remember in one of them the father is laid off and there's quite a sense of impending trouble when the unemployment insurance will soon run out
apr 8, 2025, 1:02 pm • 38 0 • view
Yeah and after he hates the grocery store manager job he gets whereas the mom seems fairly happy doing her office job. It's very realistic!
apr 8, 2025, 1:10 pm • 32 0 • view
having to eat beef tongue. writing about the texture oh my god
apr 8, 2025, 1:44 pm • 24 0 • view
Thats a thing thats changed. Who doesnt like lengua tacos
apr 10, 2025, 4:13 am • 2 0 • view
Beatrice posting on Reddit about “glass child syndrome…”
apr 8, 2025, 1:05 pm • 2 0 • view
Beezus goes to college and they never hear from her again, lol
apr 8, 2025, 1:11 pm • 5 0 • view
Remember how Henry was mad at her for getting a “girl bike” at the police auction even though it had a seat and handlebars and everything? Beezus couldn’t win.
apr 8, 2025, 1:13 pm • 4 0 • view
She was parentified to hell and back too.
apr 8, 2025, 1:50 pm • 4 0 • view
One of very few popular children’s books that features a working class family, instead of a middle class or wealthy one.
apr 8, 2025, 1:03 pm • 12 0 • view
Not exactly. Her dad was IIRC an accountant in Portland, which would have made them UMC by 60s-70s standards but their living standards would be LMC today
apr 10, 2025, 4:13 am • 0 0 • view
The dad has some kind of job in an office in the first book but he doesn’t have a college degree. He gets laid off and eventually gets a job in the checkout line at the supermarket. In one of the later books, he goes back to school to become a teacher.
apr 10, 2025, 9:57 am • 0 0 • view
I loved these books when I was a kid. (With undiagnosed adhd) No wonder I identified with her so much 🙄
apr 8, 2025, 11:15 pm • 0 0 • view
I loved those books growing up and you now have me thinking about them in a different light thank you!
apr 8, 2025, 6:32 pm • 0 0 • view
I wouldn't have thought about them except I read the first four to my kid and I was like "why are they making this 10 year old girl drag her 4 year old ADD sister to the library? Isn't their mom at home?" and it went from there.
apr 8, 2025, 7:14 pm • 3 0 • view
lol excellent
apr 8, 2025, 11:19 pm • 0 0 • view
"We scrimp and pinch to make ends meet." - the line from the Ramona books that lives eternally in my brain.
apr 8, 2025, 1:20 pm • 2 0 • view
and I had a bus pass, a library card, a free summer camp sponsored by auto-workers union, a polio vaccine at my public school, and I could ask a cop to help me cross the 6 lane street in downtown Detroit
apr 8, 2025, 2:43 pm • 3 0 • view
one thing i've noticed with people from the boomer era (And I am not picking on boomers here - I am sure this will be true through the generations) is they talk about the past and then I do the math and I realize they were 12. You were born in 1955 you did not march for civil rights.
apr 8, 2025, 1:00 pm • 195 12 • view
I was born after the Civil Rights movement, yet I have some consciousness of it from great PBS series, or political figures like John Lewis and the Democratic Party, generally. Even school taught it a little. It was a credit to a still strong democratic political culture that we “remember” it.
apr 8, 2025, 1:57 pm • 3 0 • view
As a boomer, I am nostalgic for 94% marginal tax rates on the ultra wealthy and corporations paying the same share of federal income taxes they did in the 50's. The rest, not as much.
apr 8, 2025, 1:21 pm • 13 0 • view
apr 8, 2025, 1:06 pm • 113 15 • view
remember on Old Twitter when that dude went fully THIS IS WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU about like, Nintendo 64 and Capri Sun
apr 8, 2025, 1:09 pm • 21 3 • view
Nintendo 64 was cool but we have the Switch now and I think that’s also pretty cool!
apr 8, 2025, 2:04 pm • 2 0 • view
The *weird* like Rockwell-esque painting of a kid opening an N64 for Christmas
apr 8, 2025, 1:54 pm • 8 0 • view
RETVRN (to Donkey Kong Country)
apr 8, 2025, 2:20 pm • 6 0 • view
I remember back then. We were so poor that if my brother hadn't gotten a deer that year, we wouldn't have had any meat all winter. It was NOT "easier times".
apr 8, 2025, 1:57 pm • 4 0 • view
This seems unfair. Boomers=born1946-64. So someone born in 1946 certainly could have marched for civil rights in the early 60s. Although James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, &Andrew Goodman who were killed in MS in 1964 were born in 1938-1939, many activists, black&white, were younger.
apr 8, 2025, 2:11 pm • 3 0 • view
I wonder if this aspect is a mostly American phenomenon, to the extent that it exists? Haven’t noticed it to the same extent elsewhere (obviously limited to personal experience 🤷♂️)
apr 8, 2025, 2:04 pm • 1 0 • view
Probably. There were big protests in the UK and France but the U.S. feels unique in that activism and popular culture feel much more tightly fused the popular imagination, so that just going to Woodstock was a revolutionary act. This is likely due to the Vietnam War’s impact.
apr 8, 2025, 2:44 pm • 2 0 • view
I believe, based on some personal experiences and bolstered by lots of reading, this kind of nostalgia also exists(ed) for some older people in the former USSR. Things were "simpler back then," etc. I think it makes sense that these two cultures would have similar types of postwar nostalgia.
apr 8, 2025, 2:51 pm • 2 0 • view
True. Civil rights was almost entirely Silent Generation, as was the antiwar leadership and pretty much all the iconic 60s cultural figures. Boomers were most of the Vietnam draftees and demonstrators but participation is entirely different from, “we made that happen.”
apr 8, 2025, 2:56 pm • 2 0 • view
The best we can do are the oldest boomers (my parents), my Mom was a British Invasion fan but Dad is a lifelong Kingston Trio and pre-electric Bob Dylan fan. I don't think his Mom would have let him go down to Mississippi at age 15, though.
apr 8, 2025, 1:04 pm • 4 0 • view
My mom (50) went down to Mississippi at around 15 to help w voter registration but she had to run away to do it. She said she dressed a lot of head wounds. Her & her brother (54) were both arrested for throwing eggs at George Wallace when he visited St Paul. Both were well under 18. There were some💪
apr 8, 2025, 1:50 pm • 11 0 • view
yah i am not saying no young people ever did anything but...
apr 8, 2025, 1:51 pm • 4 0 • view
Oh I know. Your point stands 🏆
apr 8, 2025, 2:00 pm • 0 0 • view
like it's all a bit "we didn't start the fire" yes you lived through all that stuff but you didn't *do it* mostly
apr 8, 2025, 1:59 pm • 70 1 • view
Possibly the worst pop song ever written. Boomer nostalgia shit. They may not have “started” the fire but they definitely dumped kerosene all over it.
apr 8, 2025, 2:03 pm • 5 0 • view
Funny how the song stops at "the end of history"
apr 8, 2025, 2:14 pm • 4 0 • view
?? It stops then because it came out in 1989 (a couple months after the original “end of history” essay).
apr 8, 2025, 5:41 pm • 1 0 • view
Yeah I know it's just wild that it just encapsulates the era between 1945-1989
apr 8, 2025, 7:03 pm • 2 0 • view
and much of it was...when you were a kid or teen.
apr 8, 2025, 2:01 pm • 37 1 • view
Where do you think hippies and the anti-Vietnam war movement came from? We knew about the civil rights movement. Everyone watched the news, which was not politicized as it is now. We also weren’t distracted by social media so we read newspapers and books, and listened to the radio.
apr 8, 2025, 4:42 pm • 0 0 • view
The problem with news today isn’t that it’s politicized, it’s that it’s false. News was very political then to, but it generally wasn’t self-consciously lying.
apr 9, 2025, 2:07 pm • 0 0 • view
It's called Kevin Arnold syndrome, so sad.
apr 8, 2025, 2:17 pm • 13 1 • view
It's kinda how popular media assumes that all baby boomers were flower child hippies in the 60's and 70's and then switched over to being button-down conservatives once Reagan was elected. Less than 10% of them were hippies. Young Americans for Freedom was a huge force back then.
apr 8, 2025, 2:44 pm • 3 0 • view
Same with thinking grunge GenXers all turned into Trumpers. Yeah there’s some who did that (don’t look at what Billy Corgan is up to now), but there were a ton of Young Republican types then too.
apr 8, 2025, 5:38 pm • 1 0 • view
And plenty of Rush Limbaugh listeners.
apr 8, 2025, 6:07 pm • 1 0 • view
Exactly. I missed Woodstock because I had a Little League game.
apr 8, 2025, 2:02 pm • 4 0 • view
I think most generations long to return to childhood (when they felt most cared for and safe) and young adulthood (when they felt the most powerful) It's no surprise that the Boomers want to turn the clock back to the 50s and 80s
apr 8, 2025, 2:09 pm • 4 0 • view
Generational theorist here. This is absolutely correct. It is entirely unique to Boomers. And you should pick on them when you catch them doing it.
apr 8, 2025, 1:11 pm • 0 0 • view
Hey, I was ten on August 8, 1974. I was old enough to get mad because my summer sleepover in the backyard tent got cancelled because my friend's mom was pissed. I blame Nixon and Watergate to this day.
apr 8, 2025, 1:21 pm • 6 0 • view
Near the same age - saw Grandpa watching Watergate coverage obsessively & even watched w him some while he explained & cussed a lot.
apr 8, 2025, 1:36 pm • 1 0 • view
My mom set up her ironing board in front of our big, enormous 20 inch screen to watch. Not being able to watch cartoons after school is another thing I blame Nixon for.
apr 8, 2025, 1:39 pm • 5 0 • view
Looked a whole lot like this. Was proud I got to go on the roof to help Grandpa fix the antenna
apr 8, 2025, 1:55 pm • 2 0 • view
Oh, we had the fancy wood-cabinet model. And one of those motor-driven aerials.
apr 8, 2025, 1:58 pm • 1 0 • view
They upgraded to something similar later. The old one moved into the Florida room (they lived in Hialeah) for us kids. Sometime later we used that TV for some kinda high tech “video game”
apr 8, 2025, 2:02 pm • 1 0 • view
Hey! That was our TV!
apr 8, 2025, 1:58 pm • 2 0 • view
I live on old Route 66 and the nostalgia for it is over the top. Boomers were very little kids when the interstate highway system was being built, they barely experienced the thing they are nostalgic for. And by today’s standards it was dangerous, uncomfortable and slow.
apr 8, 2025, 2:16 pm • 7 0 • view
I do my best not to fall into this trap AND keep an open mind about “the kids today”. Just because I was born in the 70s doesn’t mean I was blowing coke at Club 54.
apr 8, 2025, 1:04 pm • 5 0 • view
I'll take the corporate tax rate from that era, sure, just not the racism, sexism, mysoginyband general bigotry. I also have no desire to see McCarthyism back in full bloom. Oh, wait, that returned after 9/11. Gotta have those off-shore villains to unite the people you're dividing on-shore.
apr 8, 2025, 5:57 pm • 3 0 • view
📌
apr 8, 2025, 1:27 pm • 1 0 • view
I started out in a family of 7 living in a house a little bigger than 1200 square feet and we ate home cooking and out veg garden And believe it or not we just had one bathroom imagine that
apr 9, 2025, 11:41 am • 0 0 • view
So true. I remember those times. A family vacation was the whole family piled into a station wagon that broke down half way to the destination. My recollection was that it was a great time because the motel we stayed in had a pool. My father remembered it differently.
apr 8, 2025, 1:14 pm • 18 0 • view
My dad bought a motel in the late 60s. I was the desk clerk & pool boy, and my mom and sister ran the restaurant. We sold it soon after. I recently read a years-old review of it and it has suffered a great indignity: mattresses in the pool!
apr 8, 2025, 3:30 pm • 2 0 • view
The pool! The pool! So exciting to use the pool!
apr 8, 2025, 1:53 pm • 11 0 • view
Right. You still see those ‘50’s motels around. The pool is smaller than what people put in their backyards today.
apr 8, 2025, 2:13 pm • 5 0 • view
Exactly! Waiting for the tow truck on the side of the road somewhere in bum fuck Arizona on the way to the Grand Canyon. When dads new pride and joy, the country squire station wagon, the pinnacle of American exceptionalism in the 60’s, decided to strand all of us for three hours in the desert.
apr 8, 2025, 3:48 pm • 1 0 • view
It's even less serious than that. They want The Simpsons or Family Guy, where one moron father is magically able to support a family of 5.
apr 8, 2025, 1:04 pm • 5 0 • view
Not to mention atomic culture, and women in the kitchen. Plus no matter what fad we’re in today, mcm houses and furniture for ave people were downright ugly and sad.
apr 8, 2025, 10:40 pm • 0 0 • view
even fast food lacks color a lot of times now! dreary central.
apr 9, 2025, 1:05 am • 0 0 • view
apr 8, 2025, 5:08 pm • 0 0 • view
And Hollywood's framing: Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie & Harriet, Donna Reed
apr 8, 2025, 10:04 pm • 4 0 • view
I remember the “grittiness” backlash to that on TV shows in the 80s because people were so over the perceived pap of those “everything is perfect and easy” shows, because they were so far from people’s real experiences.
apr 9, 2025, 1:22 am • 3 0 • view
My husband and I just discussed this last night. He said, "When do they think America was ever great?" I responded "In the '50s" That's when white men ran everything and Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver depicted a lifestyle that was provided by taxing the rich 91% and corps 32%.
apr 9, 2025, 9:24 am • 1 0 • view
Kinda like how people romanticize Regency and Victorian times imagining they'd be wealthy with servants instead of ever imagining themselves as the servants! Or as field hands. Or on the factory floor before workforce safety laws
apr 8, 2025, 4:27 pm • 37 2 • view
Or in war! No, I’ll be welcomed home as a hero and not be bleeding out in a shell hole in Ypres while a rat chews off my hand.
apr 8, 2025, 4:30 pm • 26 1 • view
Everything is awesome until you end up as one of the poppies that grow in Flanders’ fields.
apr 8, 2025, 6:44 pm • 16 1 • view
There was an episode of Bob’s burgers about that I think.
apr 8, 2025, 6:41 pm • 0 0 • view
One reason why I love the Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" is that Rod Serling is deliberately exposing the dark heart of mid century American Suburbanism
apr 8, 2025, 2:05 pm • 7 0 • view
I remember when clothing was well made enough it could be handed down
apr 8, 2025, 2:43 pm • 6 0 • view
I don't think the right wing is aiming for the 1950s - they're aiming for the 1890s. They want to bring back child labor, get rid of women's voting, make low-wage factory jobs the norm, without union protections, or regulations for health & safety. And that's before we get to immigration & racism.
apr 8, 2025, 5:43 pm • 1 0 • view
The term for this is “restorative nostalgia” that romanticizes how things were versus how they really were. It lacks self-awareness and accountability, which makes a shoe-in for MAGA.
apr 8, 2025, 2:18 pm • 3 0 • view
I live in a state where the prevailing culture believes the Andy Griffith Show was a documentary.
apr 8, 2025, 4:33 pm • 0 0 • view
An affluent able-bodied white male adult. It was certainly not more comfortable for women, minorities, or people with disabilities or illnesses (polio, etc)
apr 9, 2025, 4:46 am • 0 0 • view
There's never alcoholism, adultery, embezzlement, domestic violence or child abuse when thinking back to "days of yore." That, combined with a complete absence of racism and LGBT people, makes for a sanitized version of America tha never existed.
apr 8, 2025, 1:07 pm • 29 1 • view
Yup. Watched Grease the other night with my kid, which I loved as a kid, and there was not a single person of color. Not one.
apr 8, 2025, 1:58 pm • 12 0 • view
Bull’s-eye!
apr 8, 2025, 3:35 pm • 0 0 • view
Not to mention that a huge percentage of 1950s adults were walking around with untreated PTSD from the war or from the economic dislocations of the 1930s.
apr 8, 2025, 4:00 pm • 2 0 • view
Plus mental degradation from leaded gasoline fumes.
apr 8, 2025, 6:19 pm • 1 0 • view
My father's family was poor. They were on "relief" and he and his sister both had lifelong eating disorders. He was an alcoholic and both he and his sister were diabetic. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
apr 8, 2025, 5:26 pm • 0 0 • view
Also, people of color and all women were not having such a great time. Many Black women worked low-paying jobs, and "housewives" (work-from-home domestic workers with no pay) juggled kids and oppressive husbands. This is the *Great American Myth* that needs to be debunked and stomped on daily.
apr 8, 2025, 4:08 pm • 5 0 • view
Amen!
apr 8, 2025, 4:52 pm • 1 0 • view
Don't forget the women were all off their tits on “mother's little helpers” because life was so shit. That probably made things seem far better than they really were because the parents didn't argue because Mum was in another world and Dad was so fucking exhausted all he could do was eat & sleep.
apr 8, 2025, 3:25 pm • 0 0 • view
100%
apr 8, 2025, 10:29 pm • 0 0 • view
Segregation. Polio. Mumps. Measles. Rubella. Cars made of steel w/ no breakaway engine bolts, whiplash arrestors, air bags, or shoulder harnesses. Smoking everywhere. Rivers that caught on fire. Infant mortality 4 times higher. (Worse among minorities.) Contraception illegal. I got more.
apr 8, 2025, 2:03 pm • 8 0 • view
Not even kidding, I put a lot of blame on Nick at Nite. I think too many 80s and 90s kids left the channel on after the Bugs Bunny reruns ended and were led to believe that shows like My Three Sons and Dobie Gillis were realistic portrayals of the 50s.
apr 8, 2025, 1:44 pm • 8 0 • view
half-acre vegetable gardens are a helluva lot of work hours..
apr 8, 2025, 1:01 pm • 18 0 • view
It also often focuses on culture that people still enjoy, for example, movies set in the 50s, which feature mostly Chuck Berry or Elvis, when the majority of people, even teens, listened to Perry Como and other swing vocalists, or other movies vastly overestimating the size of protest movements.
apr 9, 2025, 12:12 pm • 2 0 • view
For her entire life my grandmother wouldn't eat just the chicken meat. She'd make sure everyone else got the best meat first, then chew the gristle and crack the bones to eat the marrow.
apr 9, 2025, 12:36 am • 1 0 • view
Nostalgia as the perspective of a kid whose life experience is insular and local. Especially if you weren’t responsible for meeting your own needs or parents/caretakers hid the struggle. And shit circumstances harden kids in cycles of blame and anger. Ideologies reflect an unwillingness to evolve.
apr 8, 2025, 2:37 pm • 3 0 • view
So true. This is my grandmother and a couple of her kids; this would have been early 1920s. They were average income. I am always surprised at how poor people looked in family photos until after about 1945.
apr 8, 2025, 11:13 pm • 6 0 • view
This is happening for the 90s too.
apr 8, 2025, 1:18 pm • 5 0 • view
And through stories told via the strictly censored/idealized TV and movies that were being made at the time.
apr 8, 2025, 2:17 pm • 1 0 • view
The 50s according to my mom's biography (Kansas): in high school, she lived with an old lady as a domestic. She graduated high school and went to work in a market. She got pregnant and moved into a home for wayward girls. Gave her baby girl up for adoption. Never told anyone. Moved to California.
apr 8, 2025, 1:59 pm • 6 0 • view
it does seem they're neglecting polio and mid century lynchings for sure.
apr 8, 2025, 3:11 pm • 0 0 • view
I think about this a lot. They don’t want to “MAGA.” They want to live in a fantasy that was marketed to their parents in 1952.
apr 8, 2025, 9:22 pm • 8 0 • view
No, it was all Leave it to Beaver! Dad had a study, mother wore pearls as she served pot roast, and we all hung out at the malt shop!!!
apr 8, 2025, 2:38 pm • 2 0 • view
The ultimate white privilege is reconstructing someone else’s childhood through the lens of your ideals. We were all one big happy family. Remember?
apr 8, 2025, 3:50 pm • 0 0 • view
I grew up in a relatively prosperous 1960s California suburb, and it's easy to get lost in that golden glow of childhood contentment. Thing is, I was precocious, so I was aware of the civil and women's rights movements; I was trans, and had no cultural concepts available to understand myself. 1/2
apr 9, 2025, 7:52 am • 4 0 • view
Even when I was 8 years old in 1970, I understood I wasn't living in a golden age. I was living in a golden age for those who were white, male, cis, het, and middle class or higher. That's not the sort of world we should be yearning for. 2/2
apr 9, 2025, 7:52 am • 5 0 • view
Yes x 1,000 There could not be a more idyllic childhood than The Sandlot. Beautiful weather, racial harmony, casual destruction of priceless memorabilia.
apr 8, 2025, 2:38 pm • 6 0 • view
Yeah it was only kinda alright for white people with good jobs. That period of history was still based on exploitation of the lowest in society, especially black people and migrants
apr 8, 2025, 1:53 pm • 4 0 • view
My neighborhood growing up in the 50s, we were surrounded by stay at home moms who were alcoholics, don't blame them either
apr 8, 2025, 2:48 pm • 2 0 • view
Shared bedrooms and only one car. Christmas was a filled stocking and 2-4 gifts per person. My mother and her siblings got a table and chairs set every Christmas. It was the same set painted a new color each year. When summer was in full swing, the table set disappeared… Glory days?
apr 8, 2025, 10:15 pm • 3 0 • view
Are you trying to tell me my life won’t turn into Mad Men if we do the tariffs?
apr 8, 2025, 1:04 pm • 4 0 • view
You might end up a divorced, unpleasant drunk, so there's hope.
apr 8, 2025, 1:09 pm • 7 0 • view
look at all the happy white people!
apr 8, 2025, 10:43 pm • 0 0 • view
Agreed….Trump wants to go back to when the golden boy could f-around and his rich daddy would bail him out. Now he’s on his own and longs for the comforts of that “golden age”; forever the spoiled brat.
apr 8, 2025, 8:54 pm • 3 0 • view
"And they all made out of ticky tacky and they all look the same." One of my fondest memories, but hardly a picnic in the park. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Cjk...
apr 9, 2025, 12:35 am • 0 0 • view
Trump is a gush of rose tinted golden age thinking,privilege lens nostalgia, history washing bilge.
apr 9, 2025, 12:54 pm • 0 0 • view
It was not all that great! Maybe it was for a rich kid in Queens.
apr 8, 2025, 3:38 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah for millennials this would be like recreating the ‘80s without the threat of nuclear war, the fear of which was palpable. But for very young kids growing or born in the ‘80s, couldn’t have mattered less.
apr 8, 2025, 2:04 pm • 1 0 • view
More than it just being "pop culture" in a general sense, these ideas often come from ads (intentionally rosy pictures of aspirational consumerism). This is like people in 2090 hearkening back to when people in the 2020s all lived in huge pristine homes with pleasant laughing multiracial families.
apr 8, 2025, 1:12 pm • 42 1 • view
Now Netflix makes the propaganda.
apr 8, 2025, 5:58 pm • 0 0 • view
Hollywood and Madison Avenue propaganda.
apr 8, 2025, 5:57 pm • 0 0 • view
RETVRN, but it's this commercial. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTtG...
apr 8, 2025, 2:21 pm • 13 0 • view
And Dennis the Menace just died.
apr 8, 2025, 4:19 pm • 0 0 • view
I was one of those six kids, but it was more like an 800 square foot apartment.
apr 8, 2025, 3:17 pm • 1 0 • view