Were the 50s really America’s golden age?

Too many times a day I read or hear someone say that in order to preserve America we need to return to the values and lifestyles we had in the 50s. Sadly, some of these people, like me, are old enough to remember the 50s and still suggest those were the “good old days”.

Bullshit.

I lived through six years of that decade, and spent the 60s as a youngster raised on the values spawned in the 50s. So did my fellow baby-boomers, the same people who crafted the government that has succeeded in nearly bankrupting our nation and eroding our freedoms. Yet they have the gall to present these same values as something to be desired.

Let’s recall those 50s values and beliefs that so many on the religious right want us to return to.

• Blacks were second-class citizens. Segregation was accepted as a solution to equality under the law. Blacks couldn’t even piss in the same toilet as a white man.
• Women were expected to be stay-at-home moms with no aspirations beyond having and caring for babies and “their man”.
• Gays rarely if ever announced their orientation for fear of harassment and physical harm. Black jazz clubs and gay baths had a lot in common. Both were retreats from the predominant white, straight society.
• Fossil fuels were inexhaustible and meant for us to exploit. Only commies would worry about oil shortages or responsible stewardship of natural resources.
• The ideal family lived in a suburb surrounded by equally white families with two children, a gas-guzzling car, all supported by a sole-bread-winning father.
• Christianity was the norm. Catholics were Satanic and no one admitted to not believing in any god at all.
• Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, but no one listened.
• McCarthy labeled everyone who didn’t agree with the government a communist, and most people agreed with him.

There were a few good things about the 50s; children could wander almost anywhere in town and be safe, more people lived in rural areas and enjoyed a more stress-free way of life. But the best of the 50s were restricted to white, Christian, heterosexual males.

The 50s were only glorious in fiction, on television shows and in novels. The reality of the 50s has little in common with the stylized nostalgic version of the 50s so fondly remembered by those with selective memories. The reason white males want to return to the 50s is because modern society has disenfranchised them. They’ve lost their power to all the other Americans with whom they (reluctantly) share the nation. They want to go back in time to a period when they were the ideal. They don’t like having to share power and influence. They’re no better than a spoiled child who has been told to share his toys with the other kids.

Evidently to be conservative entails living in the past. I see no gain in that. Besides, it’s physically impossible to go back in time except in our imaginations and memory. We are bound by nature to move ever forward. The arrow of time only moves in one direction. We can enter the future with determination and hope, or we can enter the future fussing and refusing to accept reality. Either way, there’s no going back. And who would really want to when we recall what the 50s were really like for so many of us.

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