1967: The Last Good Year...Agree?

[Muddslide]

Originally Posted by M Hayden

...to some extent that we have some degree of agency in our own happiness...

Wise words, well spoken.

I do believe: happiness comes FROM you; not TO you, by and large.

[barley]

“Completely false narrative - but people love to cling to it and perpetuate it.”

You choose to believe what you like rather than the truth. Middle class neighborhoods were much safer then. Suburban sprawl has skewed the numbers.

Today a truly middle class parent would be negligent allowing there 10 year old to play throughout the neighborhoods unsupervised until dark. In the 60s and 70s, not so.

[noledog]

Originally Posted by fazool

Nope not at all.

I was born in the early 60's and grew up in the 70's.

Looking back I found the 60's to be an unpleasant troubling time of anxiety. The cold war threat loomed heavily over us, the Vietnam war was contentious, watergate threatened to rip Washington apart, the gas crisis sent everyone into a panic.

A new social rebellious awareness resulted in a lot of the lost generations that followed.

No, I view that era as unpleasant.

Now, when you get into the 80's and the yuppie and "me" generation when prosperity exploded, computers became mainstream, the Berlin wall fell, we won the cold war and were at peace as a nation. That was the best era, and the best for music too.

(see it simply depends on when you came to age and which decade you loved - each was wonderful for one of us for our own reasons)

Originally Posted by fazool

Completely false narrative - but people love to cling to it and perpetuate it.

The fact is all violent crimes are at the lowest per-capita in American history. This is the safest time in American history -

Every single national statistic shows this is the safest, least violent time in America. Right now.

Yet we believe we are unsafe to let our kids outside to play (even though there are cameras everywhere, kids have smart phones with GPS, etc.)

One of the most violent times in American history? 1980-ish. The most rapid increase was from 1965-1970.

So, don't buy in to the myth.

+1 +1...I'm with ya on most of this! ...tho I like some late 70's music like my fav John Denver album; "I Want To Live", plus Boston, Dire Straits and Foreigner's first few albums. It's also when I first performed both solo and with a band. 77-79 baby!

** I was raised in Florida and did not see a whole lotta crime, my folks did not worry too much; but it was there at times. I am a parent and raised three awesome sons in 90's and 00's and I have to say I watched them like a hawk even tho we lived in "safe" neighborhoods. Every generation deals with the same age old corruptions that take on different shapes and forms...just try to guard, hope and love our way through.

[harpspitfire]

67 was a good year, or time i should say, i was 15 enjoying the music change and doing a 2nd year in a group back then- really, any year after the late 70's starting to turn it into this stupid mess we live in today, my 67 year old wife went to pick up our grandson at school for a dentist appointment- gawd, i thought the cops were going to jail her with interrogation, normal life sucks today

[fazool]

Originally Posted by barley

“Completely false narrative - but people love to cling to it and perpetuate it.”

You choose to believe what you like rather than the truth. Middle class neighborhoods were much safer then. Suburban sprawl has skewed the numbers.

Today a truly middle class parent would be negligent allowing there 10 year old to play throughout the neighborhoods unsupervised until dark. In the 60s and 70s, not so.

The numbers are the aggregated whole and the data doesn't lie.

[imwjl]

Originally Posted by barley

6L6 mentions the best time to be a kid and for me, that is the acid test for what time period in America was the best. Most neighborhoods were still safe for kids to play freely without supervision. Families were appreciative of a small house and one car. Today, everybody expects a 3000 square foot house, two $30,000+ cars and expensive toys like boats or 4- wheelers. Given a choice, most kids will bury there faces in a phone or tablet rather than going outside and running free.
Parents are so stressed out from their jobs and commute they have no energy to do more than drive them to some inane activity like soccer practice where the empty worship of sports is perpetuated.

With that in mind, other than the increasingly real threat of nuclear holocaust, 1967 is close to ideal.

The Cold War is over but every day brings us closer to some kind of nuclear event. It is inevitable but we can hope for the most limited event.

Wow, I sound old!

Most neighborhoods are still safe or safer and kids still play outside.

Is every day really bringing us closer to some sort of nuclear event when the stockpiles are so reduced?

[Glennwillow]

I was born in 1948, right after the end of World War II. I was 2nd oldest in a very large family. My childhood was mostly in the 50s, I had great brothers and sisters and I grew up in a neighborhood with lots of kids, playing cowboys and Indians, baseball, basketball, and touch football. I was lucky to go to good schools and I got a terrific education to help me get through college. My parents were great people, very responsible, and very good parents, though sometimes a little authoritative because of so many kids.

In 1967 I was 19 years old, in my 2nd year of college, the year I saw Simon & Garfunkel live on stage at Purdue from the 5th row, center. The girl I have been married to for 48 years was my girlfriend then, so I was pretty much in heaven. So I remember 1967 as a pretty good year. 1968 with a couple of major assassinations was not a good year at all in my memory.

But I also remember my parents being horribly wrought up over the war in Vietnam. In later years, they said it was the scariest time of their lives. And I was born a white kid in a middle class neighborhood in a pretty safe city. Not everyone was born quite so lucky.

Today we have safer, albeit, more expensive cars that hold up typically over 200,000 miles. But the information explosion has presented us with a whole bunch of problems we never imagined back then. Medicine has advanced so that the cancer that killed my father-in-law at age 62 in 1977 would very likely not have killed him today. Today's world is, I think, a little more egalitarian, so that more people of differing ethnic backgrounds have a chance for a good life.

Some things today are better, some things are worse, but all times have their challenges, their dangers, and their opportunities.

I think of the Pete Seeger song, "Turn, Turn, Turn." To everything, there is a season.

- Glenn

[Davis Webb]

The girl I have been married to for 48 years was my girlfriend then....

Wow Glen...that is one long marriage. Congratulations, sincerely. That is something!

[Tico]

Meh.

There have probably been tons of "last good years" since humans have had language ... and there will be tons more.

[Mbroady]

I was 4 in 67. But I did study the era when I was older.
As Dylan said, the times they are a changing

On a personal note 2017-18 was a great year for me. Moved, had a baby girl and made a choice to not get to wrapped up in all the “noise”. I do worry once and a while about what the world would be like for my daughter when she comes of age. But my wife and i will do what we can to make sure she is well adjusted and can “bend with the wind”

[David MacNeill]

Originally Posted by Mbroady

I do worry once and a while about what the world would be like for my daughter when she comes of age. But my wife and i will do what we can to make sure she is well adjusted and can “bend with the wind”

I like the way you think, brother. To be a parent of a young human these days is to be fraught with anxiety for the future. I grew up in an optimistic, enlightened world of infinite possibilities that is essentially gone now except for the 1% — and even they don‘t seem very happy. Why else would they all want to move to Mars or hop a generation ship to a nearby M-class exoplanet?

Our machines were supposed to set us free but they enslaved us instead.

[Brucebubs]

1967 - my life changed when the needle dropped on the 1st track of side A.

Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.

I still remember it like it was yesterday.

[Glennwillow]

Originally Posted by Davis Webb

The girl I have been married to for 48 years was my girlfriend then....

Wow Glen...that is one long marriage. Congratulations, sincerely. That is something!

Thank you Davis!

This long and successful marriage may be why the years have all gone by so quickly and with such general good fortune. I have been very fortunate.

- Glenn

[raysachs]

Topics like this are incredibly fraught, so I’ll tread lightly. Every era has its pros and cons but generally I think pining for some past era as the greatest time is generally magical thinking of the worst kind. Look at all of the horrible stuff that happened in 1968 - ALL of that stuff was bubbling just below the surface in 1967. It didn’t just suddenly all appear in ‘68. The anger that took out MLK and RFK was there in ‘67. The discontent that led to riots at the ‘68 conventions were all there in ‘67. The anger and mistreatment that caused American cities to burn in ‘68 was all coming to a head in ‘67. Viet Nam was still getting worse in ‘68 but it was terrible in ‘67 as well.

Every era has its pros and cons, it’s great benefits and it’s overwhelming challenges. Generally speaking, there is less poverty in the world, and overwhelmingly less extreme poverty, than there’s ever been. We think things are getting worse and less prosperous in the west today because the spoils of winning WWII were running out by the ‘70’s or so and the rest of the world started insisting on sharing the prosperity. The one income household was never a birthright - it was an accident of history. Post WWII generations in the west grew up in the greatest prosperity in the history of the species and somehow assumed it would last forever?

We had the Cold War then - it could have killed us all but so far hasn’t.. The Cold War had overwhelming more possibility of doing globally catastrophic damage than terrorism ever had - whoever said the Cold War was preferable to terrorism is living in their frightened head - not in the real world. Do any of us actually remember the horrible divisions and hatred of the ‘60s. Some of us were lucky enough to be living idealized Leave it to Beaver childhoods and we remember them fondly, but that was not the experience of most people in the world or even our western nations. People think crime is terrible today because 24/7 media brings all if it to us live the moment it happens, but crime has been steadily decreasing since the ‘90s and has never been lower.

Things were both better and worse than they’d ever been in 1967 and they’re better today in SOOOO MANY ways today and worse in some also.

But I wouldn’t go back for anything...

[Daniel Grenier]

I was 16 in 1967 and I remember everything and everyone the OP mentions but I miss none of it. To me, I find that nothing, I mean nothing, was actually “better” back then (well, ok, rock was much better). Rose-coloured glasses just don’t fit me well and I wouldn’t give you 2 cents to go back to that time.