Ah, yes! The infamous "good-ole-days"!
I'm the 4th of 5 children, the last of the "Baby-Boomers", being born in 1964. I remember:
- Dad raised 5 children on less than $10,000 a year up until the time I was about 16.
- The only air conditioning we had was a window unit, which didn't get installed in the livingroom window until about July each year. I remember summers where we brought mattresses into the livingroom to sleep on at night, while we closed off the livingroom from the rest of the house.
- My older brothers, at times, made more money than Dad did.
- Being a carpenter all his life, Dad built the house we grew up in. How much did that house cost? Under $5,000. Until this year I only ever had one
car that I spent over $5,000 for.
- We did ALL the work on our cars. Like head gaskets and timing gears in the unheated garage in the dead of winter. Or an axel or engine change out in Dad's old dump truck. (Interesting historical note here: That same dump truck can be seen in the opening scenes of Hoosiers, when Gene Hackman drives past it as he first enters town.)
- I remember my Grandpa on my Mom's side, who was born in the late 1800's...and his older sister, my Great Aunt Lou-Lou, who was born in the 1870's. Many's the time I recall their stories of how they grew up with nothing like what we had as a kid. The telegraph existed...but wireless telegraphy was just starting and practical radio broadcasting didn't come into being until about 1906...even then, radio's were few and far between, not to mention expensive. And did I mention you needed electricity for it?
- Large families didn't just happen because of "lack of birth control". They happened because they were quite often necessary for the well being and survival of the family itself because of the sheer logistics involved in running the home, not to mention child mortality rates.
- Doctors made house calls because they weren't 5 minutes away from the families that needed them.
And dangerous fruitcakes existed back then, too. There were people my parents kept us away from or monitored while we were around them. There were places and times we weren't allowed to go.
And, historically speaking, every regoin has had it's not-so-proud moments. Plain ole' Indiana where I grew up? Google "Indiana, KKK" sometime if you always thought the KKK was only a southern issue.
Yes, there are plenty of fond days back then, as well, the same types of good memories most people have already cited here.
But whatever time frame people live in, their biggest day-to-day concerns aren't about political ideology or rights. That's just a small slice of the bigger picture, which is simply how to go about living their lives from one day to the next.
Guns and gun control was never a major issue with my parents or grandparents...not because the RKBA was such a huge political issue with them but because so long as it didn't affect their ability to own and use firearms (mainly rifles and shotguns) for hunting and whatever other use they needed them for (like home defense), they didn't care. It was outside their immeidate concern with respect to taking care of themselves and their families.
Well...at least until they got older and started talking about "the good ole' days", anyway.
. One can ask where is the sense of an AR-15 with a 30 round magazine when most self defense shootings are over after 3 shots?
