My father was a product of this era. He had some kind of neurodivergence as a child, failed every course at school, had an impossible time reading, got beat by both his parents constantly. Contracted polio from public pools and spent years doing physical therapy to recover. Went on to get a sports scholarship but couldn’t keep grades up, got sent to military school, got kicked out, was given a job in the family oil business doing gravy work analyzing survey maps, left after a week. Ran away to Europe to dodge the draft, came home and did massive amounts of drugs and then met my mom and told her “it’s okay, I had polio as a kid, you can’t get pregnant.”
And that’s where I came from.
No happy ending. He kept my mom and sibling abused, drugged and drunk until they died of liver failure, another sibling on the way, another sibling brought a weapon to school and lives in a halfway house. My father drank himself to death after losing all family property to scams, both his and those of others. My cousins stole the family inheritance and cut off contact with me.
So yeah, that’s what I think of when someone talks about the 50’s as “the good old days.”
Don’t forget women also weren’t allowed to have credit cards or bank accounts.
And barely had the right to vote for 20ish years.
Not all though given segregation and Jim Crow laws were still in full swing during the 50’s
Worked housekeeping at a hospital. The company we worked for was one of those that hired disabled to “give them a purpose” (🤢, not gonna start on this), so they hired a bunch of elderly folk. I also feel I need to mention I live in the Deep South™, specifically Louisiana.
I hated listening to these backwater hicks wax nostalgic about all the times when their parents would literally abuse them as if it was fond memories. So much internalized trauma it was unreal. They are so fucked up in the head when it comes to being able to discern what is or isn’t considered decent behavior and there is no telling them otherwise.
People do forget what was in the “diet pills” that housewives used to chomp down.
It’s not just diet pills. Valium was extremely common.
Other drug use I found
The dad might still be on Adderall if he got hooked on it in the war. The son is probably too young to be doing it for an academic edge.
The parents may have been dropping acid if any of their friends were in the psychological professions.
These are however, the demographic least likely to have been using cannabis in American history.
And when it gets real heavy, and you start getting stroppy
They’ll deal you out some mighty fine dope
Librium, Mogodon, Thorazine, Valium
They haven’t got a pill called Hope
Thousands of us women have been cut down by lobotomy
Terrorized by ECT
Bullied into passivity, seduced into servility
I’m talking about you and me
Don’t forget that the dad occasionally has flashbacks whenever fireworks go off and the uncle who’s dying in Korea.
This type of posts always reminds me a conversation I had with some friends, where they always claimed that the lack of rules, safety measures and freedom to smoke when I was 6, and all the mentality/concept/vision of the world is now considered really bad, difficult to accept or comprehend for modern mentalities.
And we survived, they always reassesed.
But the point is we didn’t, lot of fellas died in the process, alcohol was socially accepted as a way to deal with problems to the point that life-risk jobs were having daily accidents and 99% of them the guy was really alcohol fucked.
But the deads were not there to disagree. It is only survival biases. And a lack of memories about who could not deal with the situations…
TIL I’m basically a 50s housewife
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