The Halcyon Age

I think a lot of people have images of the 50s and 60s based on some odd media images they have in their heads.

These were the halcyon days that they want to return to because, well, real Americans were prosperous and happy.

Of course that wasn't true for everybody and I'm not sure it was true for most.

If you want to ignore the growing issues in the inner cities that blossomed in the 70s with race riots and drug epidemics you eliminate a lot of the population.

We had pretty rampant alcoholism that we didn't talk about as the six pack or the bottle relieved the mind numbing shift they just got off.

The men had in many cases fought in Europe or the Pacific or in Korea and had to just man up and get over it, never mind the horrors they had seen.

Wives were often happy if their husbands spent a few hours after work at the local gin mill, it meant a little less abuse for her.

Schools were terribly overcrowded and we were entering the debt society where people bought suburban houses for little down but with a mortgage and credit cards allowed many to go into more debt.

Yes we had an exodus from the old neighborhoods that helped lead to the problems in the inner cities to come.

There were jobs, often good paying ones for most people as America benefited from the destruction of the war but the jobs were in many cases mind numbing and we introduced the term wage slaves to depict how trapped many felt.

Now these are some of the things from that period that are conveniently ignored when we talk about them.  It doesn't mean everyone was unhappy and generally it was probably a fairly golden time for the children who were generally unaware of the problem facing their parents.

It just wasn't great for everybody.