how many think life back in say in the oldays was better even though it was a rough life .folks loved there neighbors,help who they could .never went to someone house when they didn t try to feed u ,or give a place to stay .now seems like folks talk to u through the door if they answer at all..i used to pic up corn , taters farms machines left behind ,always give some of it away to older neighbors.i dont know if it wouldnt be a bad idea for us to start over might be the 2nd chance we need to appreceate how good life can be . just my 2cents worth what do yall think .

oh yea if ive jump all around again im sorry .guess i dont know how to do any other way .may tell wife. an let her wright it for me .thats worked for 20 yrs pretty well.

I am not sure those good old days ever existed.

I think people new more about their neighbors and were friendly in the past years. Now days with 'things' to help people do stuff washing machines, dryers, etc that are supposed to make more free time they just make more time to rush,work, etc... not what they were made for!!!

However, this is still the way in a lot of small towns in the US but it's changing rapidly.

i live in small town in north east al .40yrs old when i was a young boy up till teenager .life was simple an we all helped each other in our comunnity.now ilive same place an i dont know alot of people in my town were i used to know every one .what happened .and im shure those days were better before my time.ive talked to several folks . around here seems like most poor familys are happest with life just as it is .i dont realy know if ( things )are so good .

People always remember and wax nostalgic over the "The Good Ole Days". I think they tend to remember what was good, and forget about the bad stuff.

My mother once said, "Things were better when I was growing up. I remember when it cost a nickel to take the trolley downtown, we could go to the movies for a quarter, and we could get an ice cream after for a dime. Those were great times."

I asked her, "Did the Good Ole Days coincide with your brother's Polio?"

I'm not smarter than my mother, she's not at all selfish, and I'm certainly not as close to her brother as she is, but she was being nostalgic and not really weighing out the pros and cons in an honest manner.

The next time someone tells you about how great things were back then, just think to yourself about how some of the problems of that time have been solved and how new problems have emerged. Smile to them then and say, "It must have been great." Then later you can secretly plan to test them for Alzheimer's because they're obviously starting to forget things. LOL

And if you want to know your neighbors, go meet your neighbors.

They probably said the same thing when automobiles were invented and people stopped staying local to 'hang out' with their neighbors.

Realistically it's the reason why you don't see much of your neighbors anymore. Cars, they are affordable to all and peoples lives have become modular... you go here for food, you go here for fun, you go here to take your boat, you go here to go sking, you go here to do this, etc... You don't stay home to do ANYTHING but sleep or watch TV anymore.

We haven't watched TV (shows not movies) in 2 months, and our new house we wont have satellite or cable by choice either.

Internet to do work, the rest of the time will be spent working on the house or doing something OUTSIDE like when I was growing up.

Even though I grew-up in the coming of the 'digital age' my parents did not let us get a nintendo, atari, etc, until YEARS after they came out. We spent our time outside building forts, playing with bb guns, bows and arrows, cap guns, etc.

My parents used to tell about walking downtown one night a week in order to share a nickle coke at the soda fountain (anyone here remember those?). Other than enjoying each others company, they did not call those the good old days, all they called them were the hard times with little money. They did like the part about not having to lock your house or car...

I think you can also blame air conditioning as much as automobiles
That said, I'm one of the unfriendly people who prefer not to talk to others. meh.

I think you missed my point. The point I was trying to make is TVs take over 'fun time outside' and you can do plenty w/out a TV.
Also, I haven't moved and I never said internet was for business 100% only, while I use the internet for entertainment 75% or more is for education and business.

-Todd

I miss all the kids in the neighborhood playing baseball all day all summer with no adults coaching practices and organizing game schedules. I miss everyone socializing after dinner in the summer from house to house on the front porches and not going in to watch TV until after dark. I miss being able to make fires out of real sticks and logs at Scout campouts and carrying a pocket knife without people thinking you are a terrorist or having to go through metal detectors to go to work.

I like cell phones when my car breaks down and better medical care and longer life expectancies. I like air conditioning in automobiles. I like stores being open on Sunday and after 9:00 PM. I like having more than three channels to choose from on TV and not having to watch them all sign off at midnight.

I miss the old days and I am kind of glad they are not still here, too. I wish I could pick and choose.

The line: ' It was the best of time, it was the worse of time' comes to mind.

So many of the 'good times' have been spun an sold into out collective memories. The 40s and WW2 were so good. Not necesarily so.

Look up the "Zoot suit riots in LA" or the "West coast longshoreman's strike" that happened during the war. Or the murder of black servicemen during the war in Louisiana and Mississippi. Or how the merchant marine was treated. They took some of the worse casualties by percentage and conditions but, until very recently, were denied benefits.

Bike gangs had their origin in servicemen coming home from the war and finding that what they were fighting for failed to live up to our ideals. The USA has never quite lived up to its ideals in freedom, equality of opportunity, race relations or classlessness.

We were an industrial powerhouse after WW2. But it wasn't so much because we were necessarily better at it. It had a lot to do with all the other industrialist nations having been crippled by the war. We rode this economic advantage and momentum through the 60s and squandered the last of it in the 70s.

"Father Knows Best" and other media creations project a false calm and certainty onto what were uncertain and conflicted time. People who think all was right and good at some time prior have chosen to overlook the larger picture.

IMO the only consistent thing you can say about the past was that it was a little slower and far more local. Things and people and situations all moved more slowly. A commute of twenty miles to a job was considered 'long' and it was relatively rare. People often worked one job their entire working life. The majority of people were born, grew up, lived and died in one spot.

After WWI the saying was: 'Once they have seen Paris, how do you keep them down on the farm?'. It wasn't that hard. Economics and lack of transportation kept most on the farm well enough. After WW2 the improved economic situation and cheap transportation were no longer an obstacle. The interstate highways were built in the 50s and early 60s made us a nation of travelers.

They made suburbs and long commutes possible. They also made loneliness in a crowd and isolation in a community a way of life.

We just moved into a new neighborhood and just about every night we meet up in one of the yards and let the kids play so that hasn't changed you just have to be in a decent place.

Be careful liking the past better, its easy to fall into the trap of being stuck in the past, my in laws for example, they don't need no education, kids should sit quietly in front of the tv or in a playpen, not be allowed to explore, they don't need no seat belts or turn signals, smoking doesn't hurt anyone, etc.

alwright guees my pawpaw was wright opions are like as-holes every one got one an most of them stink .. good an bad in what every we choose to make out of it .i still would like to take my 2 girls an move back in time to when i was a kid .good an bad .what i didnt know didnt hurt me a bit ,i learn how to work for a living .hard work is not a sin builds a boy into a man .

In my neighborhood we've found out who the "nice" neighbors are, and we hang out with them a fair ammount when we can, so that's sort of like the "good ol' days".

Then my dad reminds me of his "good ol' days" staring down the barrel of the Vietnam draft. Then on my 22nd birthday, my grandfather told me how by the time he was my age he'd gone to college, joined the army, gone to war, bombed cities, been shot down, and had to evade the enemy. While evading he was eating raw potatos and cutting the maggots out of raw pork so he could eat it.

There will always be bad times, but what makes our good times so much worse than the good times of the good ol' days?

During my senior year of engineering I had to fulfill a 3 credit humanties elective, so I took a course called "Technology and Man". Keep in mind this was back in the mid '80's, so the internet, cd's, dvd's, and a whole bunch of other conveniences had not yet been developed.

The entire course centered around how products designed to make life easier for people would actually make things tougher in the long run. I pretty much dismissed the prof as a Kashi-eating liberal, but did all the homework assignments, aced all the tests, and graduated. I had not thought very much about anything the prof had lectured on for many years, but it finally dawned on me a few years ago -- he was not that far off.

Granted, mobile phones, voice mail, email, tele-conferencing, etc. were all heralded as items to allow increased productivity with less work. Initially that seemed to be the case -- instead of driving to the library and spending hours researching a subject, we could now type a few search words into Google and have the data virtually instantly.

That said, it is rare that I'm not in the office by 7:30am, and I usually don't eat dinner until 7:30pm, or later if my wife is running errands. More often than not, I'm answering emails or paying bills electronically in the evening, and am lucky to get six hours of sleep.

Thinking back to the late 60's and early 70's as I was growing up, my Father left for the office at 8:45am, and was always (always!) home by 5:10pm, with dinner promptly at 6:00pm. Everyone was generally in bed by 10:00pm (maybe 11:00pm on a weekend) and New Years Eve was the one night a year that any of us actually stayed up until midnight.

It now appears to me that my humanities prof actually knew what he was talking about. Despite all the modern conveniences (or pehaps because of them) it seems that we all work twice as hard as our parents ever did, and yet there just isn't enough time left over to do the "extra" things, that in fact are probably the things that really matter.

Jim

It seems that we all work twice as hard as our parents ever did, and yet there just isn't enough time left over to do the "extra" things, that in fact are probably the things that really matter.



That’s because we have so many more “Must Have” things today then we did in the past. Kids that are 8-years old have cell phones. They have I-Pods, they have a computer and a Play station and a portable Nintendo with 20 games that cost $30.00 and up. Most kid’s bedrooms look like a toy store blew up in there. We are teaching our kids to value items, the more the better.

Our society is built on consumption, buy it, use it up and cast it aside and buy another.


We pay $80.00 to $100.00 a month to be able to watch 100 channels of TV, when we use to get by with 3-channels. Cable and satellite companies have turned watching TV into another utility bill.

We don’t repair things any more, we buy new. If a DVD player breaks, we toss it and buy new, not have it repaired.


Al this buying sucks up more money then ever. And rather then cutting back we work more so we can keep buying. Kids don’t need a cell phone, Heck it’s only been a few years that adults have had them with them all the time. No one needs 100-channels of TV.

You can still teach all these values without going back in time. Just wishing you could go back in time will do nothing but make you depressed (just look at my MIL). You want to pass on some old fashioned values, hard work, etc.

My son has his own set of toy tools at 2 years old and is always trying to takes screws out of something since he watches me do it. He was just past a year old when goes in the garage, grabs the air hose and starts bumping it on the wheel trying to put air in the tire like I did. he gets up from the table and puts his plate in the sink, etc. He's already starting to learn about hard work.

My point is don't sit around saying the past is better because this and that. Bring the this and that into te present and future.

Simplify. Our cell phones both have the capability of playing music so we don't have to fall into the ipod fad. My kids will get a computer and if they want to play games it will be on the computer and only if they install them themselves. I pay $100 a month for cable, internet and telephone combined into one service.

Of course, nowadays many people make more money than entire countries used to run on...

Is that before or after inflation and the devalued US dollar are taken into account.

I was told that things haven't really changed much:
A hours pay gets you a meal.
Half a days pay a simple night out or date.
Two weeks pay a suit.
A years wage a car.
Ten years pay a house.

Rounding off a bit it still holds true, mostly.