Posted on 08/23/2011 4:26:46 AM PDT by BUGSWOL
Their nostalgia isn't necessarily bigoted. The main reason people feel wistful for less racially enlightened times is that everyone romanticizes childhood.
(Excerpt) Read more at m.theatlantic.com ...
Why would we miss a time when our kids could go to a school two blocks away?
Why would we miss a time when a family could be supported on one income and our children were not raised in government schools?
I guarantee that a lot of older blacks miss plenty from their “unenlightened” youth.
I’m only 35 however I maintain that America peaked as a nation in the 1950’s.
This Conor Friedersdorf thinks he’s providing insight into old, white conservative thinking in this article but he’s really providing an insight into just how limited modern Lib thinking is. To Libs, the time before 1960 was all about one thing — race and oppression. And the history of the world started in the 1950s. In the 1950s, there was a drab, black and white world in which Whites went to church to hear their pastors tell them to go out and lynch blacks. The Evil Republicans were in charge and controlled everything, including how people should think, through their theocracy. Then John Kennedy was elected and the world became enlightened. Then we had the Glorious Revolution of the 60s and going forward the rest of history is the struggle between good (Democrats, Socialism, PC-ism)and evil (Republicans, capitalism, limited government). Anyone who is nostalgic for the 50s can’t be thinking sane thoughts. They are acting on an irrational impulse as a way to get back to the safety of childhood. BTW, this isn’t hyperbole—the unreflective intellectual Libs of The Atlantic really believe this.
I think the 1950s were considerably more enlightened about many things.
The "enlightenment" to which the author refers is almost certainly a false dawn.
What a disappointing article.
“I’m only 35 however I maintain that America peaked as a nation in the 1950’s.”
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Right On Target with that one!!!!!
AMEN!!!
I had a cousin who was a police captain in an Black precinct. The truth be known he hated Blacks. The local Black news paper hated him. The odd thing was I’d run into Black people through work that lived in that precinct and they loved him because when he was there it was safe. He is long dead and the city now has a Black chief of police and it is not safe for anyone anymore.
I grew up in East Los Angeles in the early 1950s, and people didn’t lock their doors or cars them There was no need to.
Today, bars on the windows and doors and gang tags everywhere is the norm in this neighborhood.
Bucky Covington got it right:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJWEvP9gtww
“Why would we miss a time when a family could be supported on one income and our children were not raised in government schools? “
The finger of government has been involved in education since before any of us were born.
A few facts:
“The first publicly supported secondary school in the United States was the Boston Latin School, founded in 1635”
“The federal government’s activities in the field of education have further centralized American schooling. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 helped create vocational programs in high schools, and the GI Bill of 1944 was the first important federal effort to provide financial aid for military veterans to attend college.”
I miss a time when you could leave your house and not have to lock it behind.
We would go on vacation in the 50s and 60s, and the parents would lock the front door. They never locked the back door.
I'm a good deal older than you, FRiend....and I would add about 5 years to your estimate.
IMHO....things began to turn south just after Kennedy was murdered in Dallas TX by persons unknown.
And when they turned south...they went south in a hurry. We had a brief respite during the Reagan presidency, and again during the Bush II first five years, but then...south we continued to go.
Kind of like walking down a flight of steep stairs; one wonders where the bottom is....and if we'll find a true leader in time to not only hold us in place but begin climbing back up.
In 500 years or so, historians are going to have a ball with this period of time!
My understanding of America leads to believe that the best I ever saw America was in 88/89 when they had a televised “goodbye” to Ronald Reagan.
There were about 20 kids that were given 10-20 seconds to describe why Reagan was important and such a great leader. They understood clearly that Reagan had changed America for the better and I completely agreed.
I think the apex was June 6th, 1944.
Some people can only see the world in a twisted way.
Thanks for a most cogent post.
The black civil rights issue was the last one liberals were unequivocally on the right side of morality and history and (most) conservatives were unfortunately on the wrong side of both.
Since liberals cannot make very good arguments for their policies based on today’s issues, they love to restage every issue in the light of the civil rights movement. It’s forever 1965 in Selma. If you oppose or criticize any of their policies, no matter how unrelated to race, you must want to bring back Jim Crow.
This is somewhat similar to the way some conservatives replay every international conflict in light of WWII. It’s always 1938 and we’re in Munich.
Yep, by the time the flim-flam zip code became mandatory, it was a done deal for the maxists!
;(
Semper Watching!
I’m only 35 however I maintain that America peaked as a nation in the 1950’s.
So does Mark Steyn. He makes the argument through the picture of plucking a man up from the beginning of the nineteenth century and dropping him into the typical suburban home of the 1950s. There the time traveler sees refrigerators, air conditioning, table top radio, television, washing machines, the automobile and the 707 jet.
Mark then describes another fifty year jump and not seeing anything really new except that the entertainment devices have shrunk and improved. It took eighteen months to build the Empire State Building, but it will be eighteen years and counting before a new building replaces the WTC (maybe).
Man was curing polio and developing vaccines for curing and eradicating terrible diseases, today we consider among our drug miracles Viagra. Fifty years ago, we would spread DDT around to kill off Malaria, today we allow Malaria to kill us off because of political correctness and earth worship.
I wasn't anywhere near the 1950s or 60s but where is our Hoover Dam, our man walking on the moon, Concorde jet, Panama Canals, winning major world wars on two fronts against Tier 1 enemies? All we have is the Apple iPad 2?
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