Awww don't be mad, Steve.
Your post really was enchanting.
Did you write it?
I think it was great, like a massage, but surely you've heard of "the old oaken" bucket delusion?
"The water was never as cool and sweet and pure as it was on my grand daddy's farm when I dipped it from the well in an old oaken bucket"
I think it was our innocence that made us so content. We didn't know about the war in VietNam, and the threat of nuclear war, and that blacks were still kept out of restaurants, and that Red Dye Number 4 was giving us cancer. We were kids. Happy kids. Unfortunately this wasn't everyone's reality.
Please spend a few moments with us remembering the moral "good times"
of the 1950s.
Think about a time - almost a century after the Civil War - when racial
segregation and subjugation were still cemented into law, enforced by
terrorism encouraged by the state.
Was that a moral time?
Think about a time when women had no real choices in life. They were
not allowed, for the most part, equal opportunity in education and
employment. And if they dared to contemplate terminating a pregnancy,
they faced the threat of exposure and arrest, public shame, and the very
real risk of dying at the hands of a back-alley abortionist.
Was that a moral time?
Think about a time when gay men and lesbians were forced into lives of
fear and silence. Or a time when the disabled lived out their lives in
loneliness and frustration because the access and opportunities you and I
take for granted were simply denied them.
Was that a moral time?
And think about a time of the "loyalty oaths" of the McCarthy era or the
list of "subversive" organizations maintained by the Attorney General, a
time when citizens were subpoened by Congress to account for their
political beliefs and rat on their friends. Was that a moral time?
It's time to set the record straight. The "moral" 1950s - the "golden years"
lovingly recalled by Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan and Jesse Helms and
those who share their beliefs - were in fact a deeply immoral time. |
