Oh yeah, the 50's were great. Women, blacks and jews knew their places. So did the gays. Definately a culturally superior time.
Sort of a non-sequitor, but you raise some interesting points. What, indeed, constitutes "knowing one's place"?
Is it a matter of conforming to what an oppressive group considers your place to be, or is it something else?
Did women know their place in the 50's? They were saddened when a child's life was lost before birth. They felt personally invested in the success and furtherance of their families, often to the exclusion of their own more personal needs and desires. They supported their husbands, and avoided divorce. Compare these attitudes, along with their benefits to scociety, to the current attitudes of abortion on demand, detachment from the family well being, and the marriage that lasts as long as a honeymoon, which results in confused and angry children that are well described in the thread about teaching I see this morning.
Blacks knowing their place? Every black family I knew growing up had two parents, almost no one in jail, no one in a gang, no one addicted to drugs, no one engaging in violence and rioting, and always friendly and courteous. People worked hard, and prayed harder. These virtues came from
within the black community, not from without. They were not based on any kind of oppression, but by a firm idea of what is right versus what is wrong. Morality. That's the source of one's "place".
Jews? They had struggled against the entire world for so long that they had become stronger, like a sword that is beaten on an anvil. Our entire country stepped forward in the 40's to stop the holocaust. The two jewish kids from my fourth grade class are happy and successful people. Their self worth was never contingent upon their parents being members of a certain country club.
Gays? What place have they ascribed for themselves? The sterotype says that they are singers and dancers, or artists or other creavtive thinkers. As with all sterotypes, this too has broken down. Now, due to being unwilling to take the proper actions, they are a group of invalids and dying martyrs, suffering a modern plague. The tragedy is that these are all needless deaths. Simply stop the behavior. "Well, that's an untenable choice, so we will say that we have a right to self destruct to maintain an abhorrent and dangerous lifestyle, and be proud of our stubborness." That's some place they have carved out for themselves.
What makes the 50's a culturally superior time is that people made better choices, no matter what "group" you choose to identify with or fall under.
So the "culturally superior" Fifties--with its narrow-minded ideas about race, and politics, and gender--spawned three generations of culturally inferior people.
You are trying to see an chicken-and-egg relationship here. The ideas, whether you see them as being "narrow minded" or not, were ideas that came from free individuals, not ideas artificially imposed by the government. We had a culture where people said what they wanted, hired who they wanted, and lived where they wanted. We sold houses to whomever we wanted, and taught our children the values we wanted.
When, praytell, did it become the job of government to step in and become a social traffic cop, enforcing politically correct speech, rules about speech, employment, and real estate? This is a loss of the freedom that so many died to maintain in WWII, and it is Orwellian, no, it is beyond Orwellian in its scope.
If the culture of the Fifties was truly superior, why didn't it endure?
1) Governemnt encroachment, with the best of intentions: to make life more "fair". Life is not fair. You can only shift unfairness around, like energy.
2) Human weakness. A desire to be more "modern" and "progressive". Because we don't have God's guidance at our core of beleifs, our efforts blow up in our faces. For example, we are told to "love thy neighbor as thyself". This is the only legislation we need to guide our interaction with others. The answer is not an entire set of laws that enforce employment and housing standards that we think will makes us a more "equal" and "tolerant" society. That starts in the heart, not in the courthouse. Once again, Man gets it wrong, and God had it right all along.
Also, was the culture of the Forties superior to that of the Fifties? What about the Thirties? Twenties? Was everything always better "back then?"
Actually, the decades you mentioned had very little change compared to the watershed events of the sixties. Essentially, the values that had forged the US, the restricted place of government, particularly the Federal governmnet, the work ethic, the lengths that immigrants had to go to in order to assimilate (such as the Irish) are the values that were a reflection of the people of the United States. A lot of people decided that we needed to change all that, and we let a terrible genie out of his bottle. The genie is secular humanism.
You may not like George Carlin, but..
I disaggree that Carlin has it right. He has had a life of terrible fears and shame regarding his parents, and his comedy is his personal outlet. It does not make him a brilliant social commentator, even when he is funny. The seven words routine was funny becuase we were titillated to hear a man say bad words in public (we'll not go into the intellectual discussion of whether a word can be "bad", it's just a term for unacceptable speech) and some people thought that this was some inspired piece of wisdom. Now, kids swear unimpeded in school, and do it towards their teachers. Nice. Really advanced the society, George.
What you're saying is "everything was better when I was younger." Well of course it was! Everything was better when I was younger, too!
Not everything was better.
But
people were.
