Memory is a very selective thing. I've spoken with my father about this very subject and he said he would never want to go back to being a kid in the 1940s.
I totally agreed with him. I grew up in the 1970s and it sucked. Oil embargos, hyperinflation, stagnation, retreat in Vietnam, the farm crisis of the early 1980s, booms/busts from 1980 to 2010, AIDS, etc, etc.
Dad said what "good old days" people forget about is the great uncertainty that they lived with back then.
His best friend in elementary school was crippled during the last great polio epidemic when my father was in 5th grade. Imagine living with polio randomly mowing down your friends with no way to stop or mitigate it! You couldn't prevent it so you just prayed for those that had it and so that you didn't get it. That's all.
My father was in that generation that was too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, so he did not get drafted or serve, but there again there was a harsh uncertainty for years about your number coming up in those 2 wars.
When his brothers went off to Vietnam, there were years of uncertainty then too. Terrible waiting for letters to know they were alive and every time an unknown car came down the road, the horrible thought crossed everyone's mind, is this going to be 2 men in uniform...
One of his brothers was in the Air Force and was a fighter pilot, although he was "reassigned" to "other aircraft" and he could not disclose where he was or what he was doing. Letters or phone calls were few and far between and between letters there was constant worry about if he had been shot down. Dad's other brother Douglas was the unlucky one in the family and everything bad that happened would happen to him. Of course he was sent straight to the infantry and dad was convinced that he would never make it back, but he did.
All kinds of stuff went on back then that nobody wants to remember. People want to talk about the good times and not think about the bad. They want to remember how everyone was a great neighbor and helped each other, not the one neighbor that beat his wife every Saturday and shot a shotgun at 2 kids who were taking apples from a tree in his back 40.
Be thankful for what you have. The good old days weren't always good. My experience has been that rather than life aways getting worse, IMO I like NOW better than any time in my past. I've got 2 great kids, a great wife, and basically, I'm making up now for an un-fun time growing up in crappy places and crappy times. I don't sugar coat it when my kids ask me about the "good old days".
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