I am interested to know what life was like from the words of people who were still children then or they were from 16-30 years old.
1970s and 1980s in rural Virginia, most people didn’t lock their doors and kids ran around outside until dark. Our phone was a party line, meaning if I picked up the phone I might hear a nearby neighbor already on the line having a conversation, so I would just hang up until the line was free. We were comfortable but not wealthy. By the end of the 1970s and early 1980s we had a microwave and a VCR. Video rental stores were starting to be popular. Going out to eat at Pizza Hut was a big deal.
Mid/late 1980s and onward, technology started making a bigger difference. I got a Commodore 64 computer, we moved to a small town and got cable television and MTV, I got a modem for the Commodore 64 and started logging into BBS systems. Those two things definitely expanded my horizons a lot. In the early 1990s a year or two before the Internet got big I played one-on-one Doom with a guy from Norway via modem, that seemed like magic at the time.
1990s and onward more internet, more television, more corporations, more technology, it just got faster and faster. Once we had our magic pocket computers that did phone calls, email, text messages, navagation, etc everything has just been evolutions of that with more storage and faster processors.
I remember the US in the 70s as incredibly violent.
1,600 murders a year in NY, Chicago, Baltimore, DC., EACH. People were scared shitless to go out after dark.
in 1975, 15,000 people were murdered in the US. When the population was 215 million.
Now it’s 14,000/yr, population 340 million. Still stupid high.
Canada: 788, 42 million people.
I remember even in the 90s europe america was notorious for being incredibly unsafe to the point where it would be the butt of some really nasty jokes that I’d rather not repeat. The funny thing is that I mostly heard these in eastern european hoods where you don’t leave after dark and have brass knuckles (or equivalent) on you at all times.
Guns are just such a game changer when it comes to mass violence that even the most violent europe city hoods were afraid of the idea of guns being everywhere. I don’t think most americans can even understand how different society without guns is.
We used to book computer time at the local library and I would walk by myself at the age of 8 to go play Oregon trail on a green monochrome monitor.
It was not strange to see unattended children walking the streets when school was not in session.
there were kids EVERYWHERE.
This freedom is the most powerful memory for me. Starting when I was 5 years old, I was wandering alone in the streets, parks, gullies, and hills of Seattle and Boise, pretending to be an indigenous explorer in the pre-colonial era. My parents had no idea where I was, which was fine as long as I came home before dark.
As an adolescent, my friends and I ran amok in large office buildings, playing a wild version of elevator tag, or turning the state capitol building into a raucous playground until we were chased out. We snuck into school gymnasiums, followed fire trucks for miles on our bikes, and made prank phone calls.
My parents threw parties with live jazz bands, and I would let all the drunk dancers give me “just one sip” of wine from each glass until I was dizzy. Most adults sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher to me.
School felt like a prison of repetition, and I often abruptly got up and walked out. I forged my mom’s signature on permission slips, but after awhile teachers just stopped asking. I always returned to class for tests, so that I wouldn’t need to repeat anything.
I think kids had more latitude back then, because we occupied a space of insignificance. I felt largely invisible in the world, so I could push boundaries without consequence.
Yes, at 10, just leaving on my bike for the next little suburban area three miles away was an amount of freedom we had that is considered neglect in this atmosphere. Things really started tightening up as we hit the digital age and suddenly every news outlet continuously warned of our murder and molestation.
This is such a salient point about how life has, and hasn’t, changed. Your kids could still very well go out on an adventure nowadays and be fine, as most adults still benevolently keep half an eye on kids. But we’re so damn scared of what could happen that we don’t trust the unknown neighbour.
Take away the phone and you see the world hasn’t changed as much as we fear it has (and in some ways it has, not totally discounting the modern world)
Gonna have to be more specific. What part of life?
You can just talk about your life, how you had fun, what dreams and hopes you had for the future, and so on.
I was a teen in the early 90s. We had the best music. Lot’s of diversity among my friends but that was just normal so I didn’t really notice until the US got super racist and bigoted. Then I was like, “wow! were we all woke the whole time?” It was a better time. Also the local shrubbery was amazing, not like this new gas station garbage we have today. Most of us felt like we had a future. I feel so sorry for kids today, like, we failed you kiddos.
The death of the music industry was, in some ways, a lot like the death of reverse-fox-news.
Now it’s just fox news.
Lot’s of diversity among my friends but that was just normal so I didn’t really notice until the US got super racist and bigoted. Then I was like, “wow! were we all woke the whole time?” It was a better time.
This is very interesting and I like to hear it. I didn’t know the USA got more bigoted
The people who argue the USA was “always this bigoted” skip over the entire period between the Civil Rights movement and GamerGate. If your reference point for the past is like, the 90s or 00s, no it wasn’t as bigoted. Not to say there was no bigotry, but it wasn’t acceptable to be outwardly hateful, and most people believed the future would be more progressive.
Might be they just didn’t see it because they were a kid.
I grew up with casual racism from my dad and grandfather.
My family was always multi racial but you would also hear hard Rs at family get togethers.
Depends on the part of the country too I’m sure.
Well, idk if I would say “more”. The median has gotten less bigoted (people care a little more when you say certain slurs), but I also think that the more conservative people have gotten significantly more bigoted.
It was always bigoted. they were lynching black men until 1981.
Yeah most people tend to srgue thst the usa has been in a continous racism decay, being max racist upon its conception as a country (1600s). I’m still interested in OP’s opinion from their frame of reference - sort of suggests the truth is more nuanced and might be tied to prosperity of the country
we failed you kiddos.
they failed you. Dw OP I trust you’re not to blame
Rampant racism, sexism, mental health (PTSD from war) issues. Haze of smoke inside from tobacco smokers and a haze of smoke outside from cars with terrible fuel management and no emissions controls - to say nothing of the lead.
1970s was the end of the postwar economic boom, with several recessions during the period described. It was the time of privatization and government cutbacks.
Without the Internet, you had to find other ways of entertaining yourself. Regular toys and board games and stuff were played with a lot. As an only child, I would sometimes play my board games by myself, acting as 2 players (yeah, sad I know). I remember getting lots of activity books and coloring books when I was really young. Then as I got older I read a lot of magazines and books. The Readers Digest was kept in the bathroom, and I would read jokes or stories from it while on the toilet. Things like Legos could keep you busy for hours. I got a Nintendo and it consumed most of my time. The games were simple, but tended to be difficult, and you would just play it over and over and over again. On Fridays after school you could go to the video store to rent a movie or game as some weekend entertainment. Going to the movie theater seemed to be reasonably priced back then. There were arcade games all over the place, like at the movie theater, inside convenience stores, even in the pizza hut. We used to actually go to the pizza hut and sit down at a table to eat, it was fun. Before cable or satellite TV, there were only like 3 channels, and they went off at night.
The 90’s seemed a lot more optimistic than now. People back then also seemed pissed off about that optimism in various ways.
i grew up in a rural area in the 80s and 90s and it sucked balls.
we had to drive 30m+ each way to do anything like shopping or going out. all anyone did was watch TV and we took a trip into the city like 1-2 times a year, as it was a 2hr+ drive each way.
it was really really boring and i ended up doing drugs and drinking because it was the only way to cope with how insanely boring and awful my community was.
thankfully once I got to college it was a lot more fun, because I was around smart and interesting people for the first time in my entire life.
A lot changed over those decades, so grouping it all together seems a bit too broad.
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Politics was sanitized.
Iran and Iraq fought a brutal war in the 80’s. Absolutely awful, chemical weapons, child soldiers, human wave attacks.
The US was supporting Iraq with Intelligence and selling weapons. Except we were also selling weapons on the down low to Iran.
Congress had banned the executive from supporting anti communist militias in central America. They were psychotic zealots. They burned churches because the priest said the peasants should have rights. They used assassination, torture, and mass rape indiscriminately. The most evil people you can imagine, but they were against the left so the CIA couldn’t keep their hands to themselves.
They sold weapons to Iran that was fighting a hot war with our ally Iraq to use the money to fund the Contras in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Oliver North went to prison. Reagan and his Vice president, Bush, denied knowing anything about it. (Bush was the former head of the CIA)
Bush pardoned North after he was elected in 88. North went on to become the head of the NRA and funnel millions of dollars into supporting Republican campaign funds.
The violence in Central America continued to simmer until it burst into flame again in 2014 and led to a refugee crisis under Obama.
The chickens always come home to roost.
I miss the non chain coffee shops that were open 24/7, I miss the non chain stores that were still around, I miss the mall parking lot improvised car shows.
I enjoyed being able to safely fide my bike the 8 miles to school, I enjoyed our little party island, I miss having hundreds of miles of canals to run my little boat on.
I do also remember the race fights in the middle of school during the Rodney King trials, I remember the AIDS scare where we stopped using water fountains just in case.
I enjoyed being able to safely ride my bike the 8 miles to school
Aside from the risk of the authorities treating it as child neglect, do you believe this would be less safe to do now? If so, why?
When I was a kid there was a trail off road that ran all the way to school so I didn’t have to deal with trqffic, its now fully developed so that trail is gone
As with any of these vastly for reaching questions, the answer depends on where you live, what you look like, and how much money you have. United States is a massive massive place with hundreds of millions of people
Since everyone else is talking about “the good old days,” I’ll throw down that there was a lot more racism and sexism, that mental health was simply never spoken about, and that people died in car accidents all the time.
It was also a whole lot easier to do crimes, because there weren’t cameras everywhere and you didn’t have a tracking device in your pocket all the time.
Telephone calls outside your area code were exorbitantly expensive. Including UHF, there were maybe six TV channels, and if you weren’t in front of the TV, you missed it, and there was no hope of ever seeing it again. Ever.
I would argue that misogyny and racisim are ascendant in our time.
Sure, open racism was much worse, but they also were in the aftermath of 2nd wave feminism and the Civil Rights movement; things were getting better.
It’s those very strides that have aggravated the backlash we see now; things are getting worse.
So I’m not saying 1970 was better than today, but I’d argue that the early 2000s were.
Go back to 80’s movies and look at the casual sexism.
Don’t tell Mom the babysitters dead. The oldest sister is 17, gets an office job. She has a late thirties-mid forties man creeping on her for half the movie. It’s played for laughs. This was a kids movie.
Early 2000s it was less overt, but still widespread. I watched girls get harassed on the school bus, nobody spoke up. I watched women get harassed and groped during my first fast food job. I didn’t have the courage to speak up.
I dodged it by virtue of not having transitioned or even knowing I was trans yet.
I tried watching Dukes of Hazzard out of nostalgia…
Sheesh it’s a LOT worse than I recalled
There at least existed a sense of … decorum. Yes racism was ubiquitous, but people were forced to go about it obliquely. Because of that, there were a bunch of white people who identified with minorities when minorities were under attack. Welfare moms meant black single mothers, but plenty of white people looked at the verbiage and said, “wait a second, I need welfare.”
It perpetuated a near-universal understanding that racism is shameful. Now it’s a joke and the racists have more power.
And good luck being LGBTQ+ back then.
True, although it started getting better in the late 80s.
