We have President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho
Posted on 08/23/2011 4:26:46 AM PDT by BUGSWOL
Economically I’d say yes we peaked in the 50’s. I’d say we peaked intellectually and educationally somewhere around WWI and the Roaring 20’s and lived off the fruit of that for decades. Once FDR came in we started down the road of mind-numbed fools.
>All we have is the Apple iPad 2?
While I admit that in many ways the 50s were a golden age, we can’t very well sell short what has been accomplished since then.
First off, one should understand that the prosperity of the 50s is likely to be a unique event in history. Considering that every other industrialized nation on the planet had pretty much been bombed flat during WW II, while our production facilities were still standing, it is easy to see the huge edge we had. I cannot see circumstances in which that advantage will be available to us again.
But let’s be honest, tech these days is not something to be scoffed at. Sure, we don’t have the flying cars, and other WOW gizmos people thought were going to be the future back in the 50s. However we do have some pretty damned amazing stuff.
For example look at that iPad2 you mock. That’s capable of being a library bigger than the one down your street. It’s capable of being a newspaper from anywhere on the planet. It can be a calculator, do advanced math functions, act as an astronomy guide, and do other advanced scientific aides. It can also let you look up information on any topic at your whim. Heck, you could also include all of Mozart’s symphonies on it as well.
In reality it’s just a bigger version of the iPhone which is a pocket sized device that gives you access to a very significant percentage of the information amassed by humanity at any time, most anywhere in this country. As it has been said plenty of times, knowledge is power, and these tools are utterly amazing knowledge devices.
Yes, we didn’t go with the science fiction strides expected beck in the days of yore with spaceships, rays guns, and colonies on other planets, but we did things in the space of information sharing that are just as amazing.
Of course one might note that the information space was where the government intruded the least and derive some conclusions from that.
If we look at history to the periods of time preceding outbreaks of war or civil unrest, pandemics, etc., - and then compare the decades thereafter... we might note that society and its people follow a certain rhythm.
Adversity/fear/dissatisfaction.
Conflict.
Victory over adversity.
Recovery.
Celebration.
Normalcy.
Complacency.
Dissatisfaction.
Civil unrest.
ad infinitum.
To the elderly, the past appears perfect, the present no longer belongs to them and the future is fantasy. Memories are God’s therapy.
The 50s?
Wasn't that when President Eisenhower had to send troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce court ordered desegregation in the schools there?
And wasn't it also when he initiated Operation Wetback? It was good to have a President who understood that his job was to see that the laws were faithfully executed.
ML/NJ
ML/NJ
I just got back from a cruise vaca. The comedian was a black man whose whole routine was how the country had changed for the worse. Kids not respecting their elders, dress, girls acting like tramps, etc. He wasn’t old, either.
“Why would we miss a time when a family could be supported on one income”
I get your point, but one income can still support a 1950’s lifestyle. a 1200 square foot ranch, one black and white TV. One car. Home cooked meals. No child care expense. New clothes once a year. Getting shoes resoled instead of buying new. No cruises or jet trip vacations. etc.
Ah, not only am I a rascist terrorist, but now I am also immature.....Got it..
“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.”
I may be misreading your statement, so I’ll apologize in advance if I am misreading it. That said, you are completely incorrect to state that democrats were on the right side of the racism issue. They were not. They were the Jim Crow folks, they were the lynchers and they were to segregationists. The Repbulicans fought them to a final victory, then the Dems began the process of taking credit for what they were completely against...
damn straight...
Remember when?
Great summary, and you could delete “of The Atlantic”.
I’m sorry, but your comment is not accurate history.
For one thing, I never mentioned Democrats or Republicans. I said liberals and conservatives. Prior to the 1970s, neither party was exclusively one or the other. Both were national coalitions of regional parties that included both liberal and conservative branches.
You can call the Jim Crow boys many things, (and I’m happy to join you in doing so), but you can’t call them liberals, neither in the original classical liberal sense or in the modern leftist/socialist sense. They were conservatives, even reactionaries, although in my opinion a variant of conservatism that deviated so widely from the American conservative mainstream as to have a whole lot more in common with fascism and Nazism.
You are quite correct that those oppressing blacks were Democrats. But then so were almost all those leading the fight against them. The GOP pretty much sat on the sidelines.
While it is a truism that more GOP than Democrat congressmen voted for the Civil Rights Act, it is also irrelevant. On the ground few if any mainstream conservatives were leaders in the fight for civil rights. This was left up largely to Democratic liberals, leftists and even communists. For instance, I think you would have to search long and hard to find influential conservatives who participate in the various marches in the South.
Most conservatives, such as Goldwater and WF Buckley, saw the civil rights issue as a local or states’ rights issue, rather than a national constitutional one. The fight against Communism was much more important to them than the fight for equal rights for all Americans. While this opinion was defensible and understandable, I believe it was utterly and disastrously wrong, and later in life both of these gentlemen agreed.
The problem is that liberals gained enormous moral capital by being on the right side of this issue, and conservatives acquired an equivalently-sized moral deficit. For 50 years now the major rhetorical tool of liberalism has been to wave the bloody shirt of civil rights, and it has worked beautifully. (Though the shirt is getting a little ragged.)
I believe conservatives should have led, or at least participate enthusiastically in the fight for civil rights, rather than considering it an unimportant side issue. Conservatives today, and the country as a whole, IMO, continues to pay the price of their failure of vision in the 50s and 60s.
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