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I was wandering the long and twisted labyrinths of the Internet last week when I came across a written piece, on a site called Naturalnews.com, entitled “Days Gone By.”In it, the author is nostalgic as he recalls his childhood. It was a simpler time, he muses, when diapers were washable, milk was delivered to the doorstep every morning, and clothes were hung to dry in the sun. A more idyllic time, free from the chaos of our modern, self-absorbed lives.
CUI's Angus Bohanon shares his opinion of the 1950's "Good Old Days" to modern time. (CU Independent/David Zimmerman)
Typical sentimental bullshit.
You see, every generation has fonder memories of their childhood than they do of today. Adults today have to worry about taxes, mortgages, and which presidential candidate is more likely to be a fascist.
Besides that, memory is incredibly subjective. People remember the good and forget the bad, even when it comes to personal traits.
Luckily, we have objective records from history to cut through the emotion. So let’s take a real look at the dreamy era that the author describes. Journey back with me to the magical 1950s.
In the early 1950s, polio infected roughly 35,000 children every year, as Jonas Salk’s vaccine didn’t see widespread inoculation until 1955. After that, polio rates plummeted. In case you don’t know — and you probably don’t, since there hasn’t been a case of wild polio since 1993 — polio is an incurable viral disease that dwells in the lungs and intestinal tracts of its victims, and in about 1 percent of cases, it causes paralysis and death. I’ll do the math for you. That’s over 3,000 children dead, every single year. Rosy.
You know what else? The Clean Water Act hadn’t been passed in the 1950s, which prohibits anyone from dumping untreated and unfiltered pollutants directly into navigable waters. That didn’t go into effect until 1972.
The Clean Air Act didn’t pass until 1972 either, and it didn’t restrict the use of leaded gasoline in motor vehicles until 1990. So in the 1950s, cars were still spewing vaporized heavy metals into the atmosphere.
The Korean War, which ran from 1950 to 1953, killed over 50,000 American soldiers.
Life expectancy was nearly 10 years less than it is now. Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, heightening tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The year 1953 marked the start of the Cuban revolution, which resulted in the first communist government in the Western hemisphere, and Operation Upshot-Knothole, which accelerated the nuclear arms race.
In the 1950s, no person had ever been to space. The birth control pill hadn’t been invented. The laser, now vital for everything from DVD players to GPS satellites, was but a figment of the imagination. Nobody had ever transmitted a signal across the Atlantic. No person had played a video game. Nobody had ever used a computer mouse, recorded a home video, used an ATM or dialed a touch-tone telephone.
And now look at us! I have access—with only a slight exaggeration—to all the scientific research that has ever been conducted by the collective efforts of mankind, and I can find it in seconds. I can see huge, brilliant photos of my friends’ travels and adventures from across the planet seconds after they’re taken. I can be face-to-face with someone who is almost anywhere in the world and have a conversation in real time as if they were sitting next to me.
I can drink tap water with confidence that there’s no sewage or toxins in it. I can drive a car at 200 miles an hour. I can fly across the country in hours for the price of a hard day’s work. I can buy a device for a few hundred dollars that fits in the palm of my hand, and it allows me to look up information, contact people, and it can tell me how to get where I need to go.
I can be vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chicken pox — all the banes of our parents’ childhoods. I know that if I get in a car crash, I’ll probably be fine, and if I get sick, they can probably fix me. I know that the food I eat and the medications I buy are safe and thoroughly tested.
And that’s why I’m so sick of all this nostalgia about the good old days, when kids jumped up and down on the front seats while Dad was driving, when nobody wore a helmet while riding a bike, and when each house only had one television.
The fact is, almost every aspect of human life in a civilized country has been made cheaper, faster, easier or safer in the last 60 years. We have more collective knowledge and faster means of spreading it than ever before in the millennia of human history, and yet people pine for cars without airbags.
It’s time to let go of the past, or at least acknowledge that we’re headed in the right direction. Keep your eyes on the horizon. We’re moving forward.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Angus Bohanon at Angus.bohanon@colorado.edu.
