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Y&R Discussion Group
Reading alot about universities lately, up until recently the university was a place where moral guidance was delivered, and students were not "clients" who needed to be satisified.. a sharp reversal from earlier when students willingly submitted to the elder influence. In fact, with so much abundance of students today, I am not sure why universities feel the need to not fluster any of their charges, since they can still find other ones to take their place.
In any case, as a partial link to the robbery thread up above, it seems our North American society, and the values it exports globally, have gone to pot. I was born in the mid 70s so I don't have first-hand knowledge of what life was like in the 60s, but I believe my conception of this time to be as good as can be attained without yet being here to see a part of it firsthand. People love to make fun of the dutiful housewife of the 50s, the "square" kids of the mid 20th century and how oppressed everything was. It's true that to some degree it was oppressed, and some people got the worst of it. However, there is also much to be admired in that 1950s model which was a cycle that somewhat repeated in more mature but still innocent 80s, after a revolutionary period in the late 60s and tense 70s. Maybe people were tired of the Vietnam war and wanted to forget, and behind the scenes Reaganomics laid the foundations for the horror show of an economy we have now, but there was still some vestige of innocence I remember in the late 70s and 80s.. a much brighter, less stressful vibe than that which permeates our physical environment now.
In a few short decades, we have gone from one polarity to another.. I am sure that many people, if they were sent to a period 45 years earlier would be classified as having a mental disorder. Today, the amount of people who play videogames is astounding.. many never read.. in Canada, the hockey arena has become a cathedral. People generally do what they like and sarcasm is the order of the day. Drugs, violence, cities stripped of copper wires and anything of value in a depressed economy. Our mental paradigm has shifted so extremely, but not in a good way. For those of you who are in their 50s, 60s, or older on this board, how have you seen the changing of times throughout the decades?
I don't recognize the North America I was born into 35 years ago. Maybe I am romanticizing it to some degree but people have changed completely.
I went to college in the late 60's, early 70's. Moral guidence? Not sure if you'd call making the women population follow different rules then the men would qualify. Women living in the dorms had to actually 'sign out' in the evening saying where they were going, with whom and what time they expected to be back. We also had curfews..11 p.m on week nights, midnight on weekends. How many kids would live in the dorms now with those rules? When we ate supper in the university dining room, women had to wear a skirt or dress while the male population was free to wear ANYTHING from cut off jeans, dirty sweatshirts and other disgusting apparel. All I can say is thank goodness for women's lib and equal rights. Oh yes, this university was a public institution, not a private, religious one.
Our society has made a change and not for the good, IMO. We've become a society of greed, I've got mine, you get yours and if for some reason the odds are against you, tough. The poor, the elderly, ...what ever public help there is,... too much. We can't work for the common good of society any more. We have to spend an ungodly amount of money on wars, the military, or in the words of Eisenhower(R), the military/industrial complex. The war drums are beating to attack Iran. We need wars to prop up the defense contractors, more military spending on redundant weapons while education, health care and security for our elderly fall by the wayside.
I believe the American people will wake up and prevent the dismantling of SS, Medicare and other social programs. We have to work together to keep society from becoming a 2 class system...the very wealthy and the very poor.
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I'm 51. I remember the '60s and '70s quite well. I'm not sure what you mean by ''recent'' with regard to universities but trust me, there was no ''moral guidance'' going on when I was in college in the late 70s to early 80s. The thought alone gives me a chuckle.
But you're right that many things were different in earlier decades (and others not so much). From what I've seen, 50-60 years ago society in general was more polite and well mannered. And although fewer people attended college, they seemed better educated even with only a high school diploma. Those were good things. But there was also segregation, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and things like that. Those were huge stains on our society that still affect us today.
Back in the '60s, the Vietnam War was going strong. I used to watch the news coverage every night on tv when I was a kid and it was not whitewashed like it is today. Grainy film clips showed soliders running around trying to find cover or firing their guns, explosions, Vietnamese running for their lives, people getting killed, dead bodies lying on the ground. Not only was the war itself ugly but so was the debate among an increasingly divided nation about whether the war was unjust and whether the U.S. should pull out and come home.
The '70s saw economic trouble but on a social basis it was a ''live and let live'' decade. People continued the trend begun in the '60s toward experimenting with various forms of self-expression, with varying results. It was a fun era, IMO. Things seemed to really be opening up but then along came the '80s. Suddenly, the so-called Moral Majority, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert and their ilk, and AIDS were front and center. Much of the social progress of the '70s seemed to come to a grinding halt.
Things began loosening up again in the '90s but now here we are again with a ''moral minority'' trying to turn back the clock by denying evolution, gutting education, loosening environmental and workplace regulations, stirring racial and class tensions, and generally being intolerant and obstructionist.
So in the end, I guess the more things change the more they stay the same -- just combined in a different way.
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