People are NUTS

There is this old guy who posts on my neighborhood FB page and the other day he was going on about how wonderful the 60s and 70s were, how nicely people dressed, blah, blah, blah. But on a previous post he was talking about how he was in Vietnam and lost so many friends. Of course I remembered his previous post. I was thinking how he was contradicting himself because there may have been good things but there were plenty bad ones with a war going on and a draft.not even getting into civil rights of minorities and women.

I feel you!!!  I get nutty over something similar (I can't remember exactly what 'group' shows up on my FB) but the comments like 

"when I was that age we respected our parents ......blah blah blah" or something similar to that... 

Just drives me nuts. I feel like behind that post is some old woman/man just hating on current events.. 

People ate fresh food, not all the processed food that came after the second World War.
Or, maybe they didn't have enough to eat!

I completely agree with you. It's easy to cast a narrative onto those pictures of people who are dead and gone, people you never knew. I'm sure a lot of them were good people. But a lot of them weren't. Just like today.

Child labor is active again. In numerous states they have lowered the working age without some former restrictions. Not going through the schools for what was called working papers when I was a kid. Having 15-15 yr olds working in bar serving alcohol. That will be real safe, kids dealing with drunks. Working much later hours. Some laws have already been passed and more to come.
Arkansas, Florida,... Mostly red states who also need workers in the fields, meat packing plants, factories...
Just listen to Dolly Parton and her songs ..

Yes, I see posts like that all the time! The worst culprits are the people in one of my groups called "We Grew Up in Australia in the 70s and 80s". The members of the group love to bang on about how everything was so much better back then. Sure, some things were better, a lot of things were worse.


A funny (?) post I saw yesterday was when a woman posted that her grandkids' primary school had banned kids from doing the "death drop" on the monkey bars (do you call it a jungle gym?) in the playground. It's when you hook your legs over a bar at the top, swing yourself back and forth, then do a flip as you fly off it. All these people saying things like "We all used to do that at school in the 70s, and we're all still aliiiiiiive!" I mentioned it to DD last night, and she told me she knows a guy who broke his neck doing that! So yeah, you might be still alive, but you can't bloody walk! 

I’d be tempted to tell them they were welcome to dress like that when they flew, I mean, nobody is stopping them. Or ask how they typically dress when they travel. When the last time the women making these statements wore skirts, heels and hose to travel, or the men wore slacks and a tie. 

I admit, I don't read the comments. I know how people can be in FB so I just look at the photos and move on. 

AussieMeg - I see those ‘Growing up in Australia’ posts too and they make my blood boil. Maybe because I remember my grade 5 classmate who was killed in a car accident before seatbelts were common, so No, we didn’t ALL survive it.

I am also currently seeing all the ‘patriotic’ Australia Day posts - you know, the ones where people pledge allegiance to Australia and it’s flag and remember when we all sang the National Anthem with our hands on our hearts! No matter that we never said a pledge of allegiance growing up, nor did we put our hands on our hearts. I also want to point out to them that until the 1970s, the National Anthem that we sang was the anthem of another country - God Save the Queen - and ask if they want to go back to that.

How sad about your classmate.  I was telling DD and her partner last night that when I was a baby, mum and dad had me in a bassinet on the front bench seat of dad's old Zephyr. No seat belts in 1967! DD's partner's mum has an acquired brain injury from a car accident when she was 2yo, and not strapped in - the car didn't have seatbelts.  



I am really disliking social media at the moment - so many people are losing their minds over Woolies not stocking Australia Day merch. You'd think Woolies had kidnapped their first born, the way people are carrying on!

We did actually have to say a pledge of allegiance - didn't you?

I love God and my country
I will honour the flag
I will serve the Queen
I will cheerfully obey my parents, teachers, and the law

We had to say it every Monday morning as assembly.

I just read Old Fashioned on Purpose by Jill Winger. Jill hosts a podcast by the same name for over ten years now and has her own website. She lives on a homestead in Wyoming and is big about learning and educating others on topics that are mostly in keeping with old practices. In this book, she talks about how a lot of people have sort of a longing for simplicity. They see years past as a time when their lives were not so busy/plugged in. And while she teaches/shares about old fashioned practices, she very much states that she enjoys modern conveniences despite living a homesteading lifestyle. In other words, she advocates balance, taking the best practices of modern life and melding them with the best practices of life from years past. You can follow her and take from her suggestions even if it's simple curiosity driving you to learn how a person like her lives or if you only want to make sour dough in your NYC apartment or are a homesteader who heats exclusively with wood and drink milk from your own cow. She encourages you to take what you like and reject what seems outrageous or impossible to you. But she makes it clear that despite her many old fashioned practices, she very much enjoys making her living through technology and even as far as having a furnace to supplement her wood heater. So if you want to check out, please do. I find her interesting.

But I think the key is that there is this huge ball of crud going on in our society right now. Unchecked capitalism that is working many people to death for very little money, the dream of home ownership being completely out of reach anymore for a significant portion of our society, the drive into moving to big cities because in smaller, more suburban or rural areas the economies are failing and being pushed into cities, the mismatch between many women and men in goals/education/career ambitions (I really have read a lot lately about how men under 40 are floundering, even feeling so powerless they are advocating for patriarchy and white dominance) that is cutting into marriage/birth rates, the rise of cell phones, work email (the average knowledge worker in the 60s-80s literally wasted over 30% of their day and knowledge workers now spending over 90% of their work day actively engaged with their computers) and social media that is impacting the ways we spend our free time and is affecting our levels of concentration (I have been reading a ton about the effects of smart phone usage on the brain and none of it is good), and finally, that parenting has taken on an overprotective and more competitive tone that in generations past (parents are not allowing children to play free of scheduled breaks and they are not allowing autonomy due to safety concerns, plus modern parents are more engaged with their children on a emotion level, I think this is good, BTW, but it is causing the parents to feel more overwhelmed by parenting in addition to working full time). I am sorry this was a huge chunk of description.

But basically, our society has changed. In many ways, it's been a positive change, but in many ways, people are just plain overwhelmed. So while I can understand some older people (Boomers, Gen X)longing for a society that is more familiar to them, I can see even younger generations (Millenials and younger) wishing that life were a bit less chaotic. I can see why they are drawn to ways that might seem outmoded because they want some relief from their busy lives. And then we have Covid, which forced people to slow down. Now, I can see that working from home and trying to homeschool kids may have been overwhelming for some people making this problem worse in many ways, others enjoyed the pause and extra family time provided by not having to run in the rat race for a time, even in so far as regaining commuting time and having to spend weekends not engaged in outside activities but making your own fun at home. Sure, the pandemic restrictions dragged on way too long for some people's mental health, but many people, if they only paused for the initial 12 weeks found it refreshing on some levels. I know I did.

So, it all makes sense to me why some people might long for another time. People of all ages. But, like Jill says, I need to reclaim some of the old ways and then embrace much of the new. It's about balance really.

If anyone is interested in me backing up any of the claims I have made, I am happy to provide the information regarding all of the books I've been reading as these issues have been very much at the forefront of my study lately.

Comments on social media are out of control these days. If it's not someone blaming something on vaccinations, it's people talking about the "good old days," which exist primarily in their imagination of what life must have been like or in memories of their childhood when they had no responsibility. 

My favorite lately is the Republicans who are on board with cutting and/or privatizing social security saying that retired people didn’t need that money in our great-grandparents’ day.

In those days, people died much younger. If they did outlive their ability to support themselves and family couldn’t take them in, they often ended up in the workhouse or they simply starved or froze. Those are the “good old days” people long for. 🙄

To jeremysgirl’s point, a lot of this push in some states to return to child labor, end public schools and put poor kids to work, and to end safety net programs is the result of the need to feed the beast of unchecked capitalism. Corporations need workers who are desperate enough to work in dangerous or grueling conditions for poverty wages. As a society, we’ve raised our kids to want and expect more than that as their birthright for living in a free, wealthy country.

The oligarchs have now realized that these raised expectations are cutting into their bottom lines. They want to go back to a time when there was a working class that expected to forgo an education and simply work themselves to death. They lionize the kind of “work ethic” people supposedly had in the past when they did that. They realize Americans aren’t going to return to that willingly, so they want to elect dictators who will force it on them. And part of the way they do that is by convincing the very people who will end up doing those miserable jobs that the Dems are this or that evil thing to be afraid of.

Sorry for the novel. This is obviously a hot topic for me.