Are
you kidding me?
Life today is different
in almost every way from what it was like when I was a child. There were no
cellphones, no computers, no internet. No television, at my house.
There was radio, and I
remember listening to radio shows with my brother in the early 50s: Fibber
McGee and Molly; the Great Gildersleeve; the Lone Ranger; Amos and Andy.
Amos and Andy were a
couple of white guys pretending to be black guys. The show was hugely popular
but disappeared after about 1960. Times changed.
On Sunday mornings I
listened to “Puck the Comic Weekly Man,” a national syndicated program on which
a guy read all the Sunday comics, with descriptions, from the Hearst
publications. The San Francisco Sunday Examiner, a Hearst paper, was the paper
we got, and I loved listening to the Comic Weekly Man.
Milk, in glass bottles,
was delivered by a milk man who came along in his truck once a week.
Our family didn’t get
its first television until 1957. Well, thank goodness, because all the other
kids at school had televisions at home and talked about the shows they watched.
I never got to see
Howdy Doody, or Soupy Sales. What I did get to see was “Uncle Gary’s Fun Club,”
on channel 8, which ran vintage cartoons and old comedy shorts. Charlie Chase,
Laurel and Hardy, the Little Rascals.
I started kindergarten
in 1953, at Salsipuedes Elementary School, named for the Salsipuedes Rancho,
which took up most of what is now southern Santa Cruz County. Salsipuedes was a
K-8 grade school.
We wrote everything by
hand with pens and pencils. Typewriters were around, and I took a typing class
in high school. I’ve always said that typing was the only thing I learned in
school that helped me make a living.
Okay, what I learned in
my college journalism classes has come in handy throughout my adulthood.
Across the hall from
the journalism department was the printing department. There was a big room
full of linotype machines that printing majors learned to use. The printing
majors thought they were learning a skill that would guarantee them employment.
Alas, linotypes became dinosaurs thanks to the computer.
Computers in the 1950s
filled entire rooms, and did a fraction of what a cell phone can do today.
I used to marvel at
what my parents had seen in their lives. When they were born, cars had not
completely taken over from horses and buggies. A few days after my father was
born, the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic. When my mother was
born, the USA was not yet involved in the Great War, the war to end all wars,
later renamed World War I.
So my parents lived
through World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. My father was
deployed in the South Pacific.
The atomic bombs were
dropped on Japan.
Horses had become
leisure creatures, and cars ruled.
I came along not too
far into the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation.
We liked Ike, Richard
Nixon was called, “Tricky Dicky,” a nickname which he unfortunately lived up,
or down, to, in the 70s.
Joseph McCarthy ruined
people’s lives by calling them Communists.
We saw the Folk Scare
(Peter, Paul and Mary? Kingston Trio? Bob Dylan? anyone?).
The Vietnam War heated
up under the auspices of John F. Kennedy and his administration, and thousands
of kids were drafted to go over and die in the jungle. Eisenhower had warned
him not to go there.
The Civil Rights
movement, mass protests against the war, the Beatles and the British invasion!
Assassinations: JFK,
Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK, Malcolm X, and more.
Drugs: marijuana, LSD.
Worse drugs came a little later.
Acid rock, country
rock, folk rock, fusion jazz, and a man landing on the moon!
Mind you, in my
parents’ lives they’d gone from horses and buggies to a moon landing. How do
you wrap your head around that kind of change? Not that they had a choice.
Tricky Dicky got caught
in the Watergate scandal and had to resign the presidency.
My father died in 1975.
The 1970s, a “blister
of a decade.” - Doonesbury
Disco. Ridiculous
haircuts and fashions. Polyester.
President Jimmy Carter,
a fundamentally decent and progressive guy, so he had to go.
The Iran hostage
crisis.
The 1980s: Ronald
Reagan becomes president, and starts doing to the country what he did to
California. Iran/Contra/a failed assassination attempt. George H. W. Bush
presides for four years; Dan Quayle can’t spell potato.
Bill Clinton comes
along and starts cleaning up the mess left by the Republicans, who catch him
exercising what was traditionally powerful male privilege: fooling around with
a woman who was not his wife. Republicans lose their minds and try to nail him
to a cross for that, for years, spending millions on the effort.
Pretty funny, in
retrospect, when you look at the Republican moral examples we have now.
So Bill Clinton leaves
the presidency with the books balanced and a surplus of funds, which the
Republicans, under the figurehead of George W. Bush, proceed to blow.
In the mid to late 90s
the personal computer revolution begins. Amazon and Google are born. We all get
on the internet.
My mother dies in 2001.
9/11 happens. We start
a pointless war in Iraq, and then Afghanistan. We lose thousands of people and
we don’t get out for twenty years, and the Republicans lose their minds
criticizing Joe Biden for the way we got out. People died!
We will lightly gloss
over the thousands of people, US and Iraqi and Afghani people, who died during
the twenty years we were there.
The Great Recession
warms up in 2007, and the housing bubble bursts, Barack Obama becomes president
in 2009, and of course is blamed for the financial mess the Republicans
orchestrated.
Meanwhile … a couple of
space shuttles exploded and that program was put to sleep.
And so on.
In 2016 the unthinkable
happened: Donald Trump became president, and set the country well on the way to
becoming a fascist dictatorship, with DJT as the dictator.
Joe Biden stepped up in
1920 and tried to save the country. For which he was attacked and libeled and
hated.
Now DJT is president
again, and is busy tearing down and destroying the America I grew up in.
We used to be the only
place a lot of people could run for refuge. Where shall we run?
And that is how
different life now is from when I was a child.
