You completely and predictably ignore the point. US companies were not competitive, that is a fact. One major factor was that the labor costs to produce a finished product was significantly higher than their competitors. The unions are responsible for demanding these wages and benefits under the threat of work stoppage. The effect of work stoppage would indeed open our markets for foreign goods, just as it did in the steel industry, it is a proven fact.

Now you can claim that the reason for our non-competitiveness was management, I will partially agree. Labor and management negotiate the contract, not just management and not just labor, they are equally culpable.

But it doesn't change the fact that the US got way too sloppy in the way we built our industries. If you will notice, Japan has lost much of it's heavy industry to China and India, but they have replaced it by upping their light industry and technology based industry. But now this is moving off Japan's shores, they will be in our shoes in the very near future.

A global economy is more than exports, it is imports to offset them. Our dependency on foreign oil and heavy industries is the result of our poor planning for the future. We are paying for it right now.

 

High points are Scenarios 3, 4, 6 & 8

 

I think it is funny that, while there WERE many injuries and deaths of both adults and children riding bicycles unhelmeted or riding unbuckled in cars, there are STILL many injuries and deaths of both adults and children riding bicycles with helmets and buckled in in cars. I do not suggest that safety regulation be thrown out, but all the hoopla does not result in incredibly higher levels of safety.

Also, when children were really PUNISHED rather than 'understood' and both parents and teachers could really discipline children, those with behaviorable problems seemed not only to be less dispruptive, criminally active and even DANGEROUS than they are now, but other children who would normally behave themselves in school had a better opportunity of actually learning something because the 'bad' kids were held in check, rather than having their educations interrupted on a daily basis by the now 'incontrolled' element causing constant disruptions, arguing with and threatening teachers, etc. because there are no real repercussions for them.

Repercussions? Suspension? They look forward to it because they can stay home and play video games.

 

It wasn't even as long ago as 1959, that so much of that was true. We used to be innocent and believe that if we worked hard, we could climb that ladder of success. Now we are cynical, and many workers today believe they are owed, instead of being grateful for a job. What does that say about the way children are being raised?

 

Yeah, like then FBI director J Edgar Hoover, who have should down this site in a split-second.

Kids always think that their home is the best one possible. They can't compare. When they grow up, they forget the imperfections of their childhood and come to the wrong conclusion that they were the last generation to grow up in a decent family.

 

And he would have been wearing a dress when he did it, too.

 

Yeah... Edgar And The Hooverettes were quite the attraction at FBI headquarters...

 

I love to hear folks who weren't there try to analyze the 50's. It wasn't Ward and June or Mr. & Mrs. C., it was mom and dad. Everyone that I went to school with went home to a house where mom was waiting, every night they had dinner together, home cooked, no carry out.

When we went to school it was behave or you got a lecture when you got home. Yes the teacher would call my parents, my Dad would not get a lawyer, he would get involved.

Things were not perfect, shit happened, but the overall feeling was one of safety and peace.

If you don't believe, who really gives a shit, you are missing some of life's most important pleasures.

 

The KKK burned a cross in front of my mother-in-law's house in 1960. As a black woman in a small white town, she didn't feel safe or at peace. However, she had just moved from Chicago which was much worse at the time.

 

Since when was 1960 in the 50's?. But again, it wasn't all wine and roses, I never said it was. Just afact that for a majority of kids, the family was more important than it is today.

 

!959 was just one year before 1960. Things weren't any better for blacks in the year 1959, or any other year before that.

I think alcoholics anonymous programs weren't as well established in the 1950's either, which means that if a kid had an alcoholic father, he would have to deal with alot of flack.

Yes, I imagine the 1950's were better than the racial wars of the 1960's. The hippies of the 1960's were bad news too with their culture based on drugs.

 

Are there still people who get themselves all riled up based on the nonsensical scenarios presented in the OP? :lol: Amazing the fantasy that certain folk will conjure in order to stir reckless emotion instead of careful contemplation.

Reckless emotion belongs on the hood of the car while fucking your partner's brains out - not in issues of public policy

 

There is good and bad in every decade, every generation. The problem comes when some people want to romanticize one time or another or, in this case, hold up one decade to the standard that all are measured against. Any such action is doomed to fail. Instead of trying to point to one period as the golden age (which requires you to ignore so much injustice and misery) simply say it was what it was and try to make now a better place. You most certainly can't bring back the 50's so why keep the fantasy alive?

-S-

 

I myself have no qualms with romanticizing things. The thing that strikes me as odd, though, that is that some people, in retrospect, seem to take the "Ozzie And Harriet" TV-series style as the real fifties world...

I myself missed the fifties by a couple of years, but being from "the country", I remember there was nothing on TV after the 8 o'clock news, so we played family games, or in the summer, people grabbed a chair and went outside to sit with each other and have a talk and a beer, while the kids were playing football in the street, because in our village of 750 souls, maybe 25 people had a car, so there was no traffic.

Nowadays, after the 7 o'clock news, folks have to see their fav quizz, and should there be kids playing in the street or people sitting together talking, all hell breaks loose because there's too much noise outside and folks can't watch TV decently...

If there's one thing I've seen that has changed then it's people becoming less and less tolerant towards each other. Everyone is only interested in their own little world, there's no more socializing, no more understanding...

 

Shake, you and I can pretty much agree here. The only point of contention is that to those who actually did grow up then it was not a fantasy, it was reality. Did the social injustices and human suffering in the world exist then, yes they did. And today they still do, different places, different peoples, but it's still there.

The OP was a cutesy way of saying that all of the changes from the 50's to today were not necessarily progress. At least in the hearts and minds of those who actually did live through them.

 

1959, full framed real automobiles
2009, all the same unibody pieces of shit

 

I didn't live in the 50's, but, I know the 1950's were a good time period for Americans, with some of the negatives aside. After all, America's Great Depression was over, World War II was over, and it was a time of economic growth. Plastics were a blossoming new field. Americans were purchasing their first TV sets and washing machines. During the 1950's, jazz music was at it's artistic peak and rock and roll was in it's infancy. It was the beginning of the commercial jet age. And, as L4W1 noted, the car designs were fantastic.

 

There's a flip side to that coin, Whitey...it was also the period in which suburban sprawl became the de facto development pattern in the United States, the interstate highway system was built, and urban public transit systems went bankrupt and were dismantled. All of that resulted in the United States' escalating fossil fuel consumption and growing dependence on foreign oil. Our love affair with the automobile was great for producing rock 'n roll songs, but apart from that wasn't that positive a development.

 

The American dependence on automobile transportation is a national problem.

When Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States, President Eisenhower took him up in a helicopter over Washington, DC during rush hour. Eisenhower pointed out that so many Americans owned their cars, and that this was a sign of American prosperity. Khrushchev was disgusted, and determined that Soviet cities would always have adequate public transportation, so that one would not need a car. Khrushchev had the better idea.