My “we” was along the lines of “the sins of the fathers etc”. We reaped what was sown.

I only disagree with one comment. We may be paying the price of Reconstruction II, but we didn’t necessarily deserve it. Both blacks and whites are now paying the costs of Jim Crow, (most of them totally unforeseen and unanticipated), although most of us were not even born when the Civil Rights movement came along. Just as we are now all paying the costs of slavery, even though we were not here when it started or when it ended.

The true costs of history are paid for by the children and grandchildren of those who live it. Its a bitter lesson every generation has to learn all over again.

http://www.amazon.com/People-Lake-Mankind-Its-Beginnings/product-reviews/B002I8UOA8

That book describes what it calls “the first affluent society”. People had to work 20 hours a week, they had all they could eat, spent time playing, socializing with family and friends.

There was no competition for private property, food or other essentials.

True, it was primitive. People died young. They got diseases. On the other hand they truly had a habitablezone, community, a sense of belonging, fitting. They had all that which is being chased by us today, and eluding us.

By relaxed law enforcement I was thinking of the things I did which would be considered terrorism today, pipe bombs and hydrogen ballons with fuses set to go off over the city, which were winked at by the cops and fire department. Just suggested I quit, which I did.

In ’61 the average C- schnook could look forward to a job with health insurance, vacation and pension, and would own a house. In 2012 the same average schnook can look forward to flipping burgers, food stamps and subsidized housing. As for the advances in medical procedures are unavailable to him or her, do them no good.

I’m not saying I would go back myself, but what I am suggesting is that today’s society has many advantages such as suggested by you and ER and many, many disadvantages over ’61.

Arf

From the time I was old enough to notice, I was puzzled and a bit repelled by the Jim Crow laws, even as a child. By the time I was in my late teens I was liberal by local standards but I was still a middle class fair haired white boy. I would be lying if I didn’t admit to being more than a little pissed that our “way of life” was being torn down.

My earlier memories are not of racial injustice and segregation. They are of a time when we employed a black maid for $15 per week plus bus fare and treated her (as it seemed to me at the time) like one of the family. Other than that blacks were as invisible to me as they were in 1950′s movies.

It wasn’t right but it was a great, idyllic, time for those lucky by birth. Post war plenty at the top of the food chain.

My memories today are still filled with anger but my anger is directed at the fools that led us down the Jim Crow path and left the Southeast a stereotype of ignorance and depravity when it did not and should not have been that way. We paid the price for having de jure laws vs the de facto of the rest of the country.

It wasn’t right, we paid the price with Reconstruction II and we deserved it. The rest of the country has also paid a hefty price for failing to allow cultures to merge as they have in the UK.

There is nothing in that time that I would want to go back to.

When I was working at the Park with youth football I always felt myself smiling inside when I would see the white. blue collar, guys my age, holding their little black grandchild with as much love as they would have ever given a Lilly white child.

The future came to pass, but we didn’t react to it the way you, and any reasonable person, would have predicted.

We didn’t declare victory, congratulate ourselves on having achieved material paradise, and reap the benefits of what we’d achieved. Didn’t cut back to 30 hours/week nor did we award ourselves a six week vacation. Nope, we just moved the goalposts, and redefined “labor saving” to mean “productivity-enhancing”, and sped up the treadmill to, in effect, wipe out our gains. Hell, we work more hours now, and a higher percentage of us have to work, than in 1961. But hey, we’re way more productive these days. Bully for us!

So why aren’t we happy with that?

One other quibble: “more relaxed law enforcement”? Really? I think, Bowser, that law enforcement was more arbitrary and capricious then, and if you happened to benefit from a cop in a good mood or going to high school with him, good for you. But get crosswise with a cop prior to reforms that tightened up police procedures and held cops accountable, and your ass was grass. Law enforcement is more rigid and rule-bound today, but I think on balance we’re all safer for that.

As far as your question goes, I’m leery of romanticizing the past. Take your comment about condoms…either you were Hugh Hefner, or it was a moot point whether you needed one: You just weren’t gonna get laid, nohow. Remember the sexual repression? So I interpret your question as asking, in part, whether I’d be willing to give up sex.

When you phrase the question as just a matter of giving up gadgets and toys, there’s a subtle pressure to look enlightened and wise by saying of course you’d give them up. Who would be so shallow as to choose gadgets over a good life? Especially if, as you imply, we could throw away the condoms!

But you didn’t ask about medical procedures and medicines, and the medical gadgets that deliver the magic. And one could look at many of the gadgets you mention and dismiss and find something substantial. A cell phone could save your life in an emergency. You mention computers but not the Internet, and I would assert that the combination of the two has led and is leading to a lot of positive change in the world. Where would the “Arab Spring” or “Occupy” be without the Net?

I’d say that there’s a good case for not going back. Better to consider where we are, and whether it’s not too late to take the more idyllic path we spurned back then. We’ve achieved a lot, and to me we’re in a better position now to reap the benefits because we’ve passed beyond the heavy industrial stage into the post-industrial light-footprint sustainable age. We have tools for creating a sustainable economy now that didn’t exist back then, and we could have it all if we want it.

So I wouldn’t go back, and I would take a different path into the future. Perhaps paradise isn’t yet lost.

OTOH, I do remember being stopped by a cop because I was giving a black workmate a ride home from the jobsite. The cop told us that we “matched the description” of robbery suspects. Yeah, right, the Oreo Gang. Like most whites, I had no black friends or associates.

One of my black fellow students was forced to leave USF in 1966 and move to New York because he was married to a white girl, and they had a child together. The harassment was just too much. Although the couple were accepted on campus, the Hillsborough County Sheriff made it perfectly clear to them he did not want them in his town.

Relations with blacks were at best, formal and polite, but never friendly. In 1964, a group of black kids came by our neighborhood sandlot football game and challenged us to a friendly game. We accepted and played a hard, but clean, game, and we even played afterwards the rest of the season, but it was certainly not a common interaction for either of us.

The most obvious encounter with blatant racism I experienced was when I worked in the Panhandle one summer as a translator for a Cuban tobacco expert. The Freedom Riders were coming through Quincy, Florida, and I heard every cliche in the book: “leftist agitators”, “outsiders stirring up trouble”, the usual states’ rights
and “activist judges” bullshit. The same old rationalizations from the same old people. You still hear them today, but always applied in a more politically correct fashion. They are political dog whistles, if you’re from the south you’ve trained your ears to hear them.

In one restaurant scene, which I know was often duplicated elsewhere throughout the South, the neatly dressed and polite blacks were grudgingly served in a cafe where we had lunch, but when they left, the proprietor made it a point to break all their dishes. The fact that his cook and dishwasher were both black did not appear to be particularly ironic to anyone except my boss and myself.

I got so I could smell ‘em a mile off. They’ve all gone underground, now. Of course, no one knows nothin’ about that now. It’s like every German, after the war, claimed they sheltered a Jewish family in their basement.

When I went in the Navy in late ’67 one of the things that really struck me was the total lack of racism there. My first Division CPO was a black guy, big, mean and ugly, but a superb seaman, very respected by the senior officers and his Division. Although a strict disciplinarian, he was equally brutal with both black and white sailors.

And by the time I started school again in early ’69, everything had changed–for the better. Something really wonderful happened in this country while I was away in 1968, in spite of the riots, and assassinations and the anti-war demonstrations. It was like night and day in the field of racial relations.

I also lived in the deep south, so these incidents may seem exaggerrated to someone just a few years younger than me, or from other parts of the country. But it happened. I was there. I have never forgotten them.

The story he told me was that the pilot he was driving back with hit a black family walking along the side of the road, killing two of them. Apparently the vehicle still operated.

He says the police officer who responded told him to hurry along, he’d take care of it, it was only a black family.

And that’s the last the driver ever heard about it.

I was amazed when I heard the story and am amazed now.