A Poll

Super Survey

I'm asking because ...

I often see opinion pieces that either laud the current era versus some other or yearn for "the good old days."

The poll only goes back to the 1960s (with an "earlier") option for two reasons:

1. I didn't want to offer a bazillion response options and make the thing unwieldy; and
2. The decades on offer are ones that I have lived in and remember (the '60s, barely -- I was born in 1966).

While I sometimes find the "OMG, why is anyone complaining, we have iPads and robot vacuum cleaners!" stuff tiresome, I'm also skeptical of the "back in the 70s, everyone was polite and cared about their neighbors and crime was something they had in New York and LA, not where I lived" material.

Not just because "the numbers" say we're healthier, wealthier, safer from accidental death and violent crime, etc., than we were in [insert post-1970 year here], but because I was there in [insert post-1970 year here].

On violence, for example, I remember some time in the early 1970s (in the Kansas City area) being told by my mother that a family friend wouldn't be visiting any more because he got shot when the service station he worked at got robbed. And in the 1980s, I was a few feet away (in a small town in southern Missouri) when cops found the body of a guy my dad worked with, who had been killed by a hitch-hiker on a multi-state crime spree.

On health, I had a lot of relatives die of things that are still problematic (lung cancer, heart attacks, etc.), but it seems that these days, many of my relatives are older now than the ones who died were then, and have been through those things and survived.

Wealth? Well, I'm not wealthy by today's standards, but a lot of things that were terribly expensive when I was a kid seem pretty cheap now. Cheap as in "not as well-made," maybe, but also cheap as in "much less expensive." When I was a kid, a 19" color television was a major family purchase. I have two of them in front of me right now, each of which cost well less than $100. I also have a computer in front of me that is far more powerful than my first Commodore VIC-20. The VIC-20 cost $308 in 2025 dollars (in 1983), and I ran it on a $10 garage sale black and white television. My current computer cost, IIRC, $149. And before the VIC, pretty much any computer was way out of my parents' Christmas gift price range.

No, the politics/international situation wasn't any better back then either. Look up the 1968 Democratic National Convention, or Watergate, or gas embargo/rationing, or Desert One, or Iran-Contra, or any number of other scandals and arguments.

All in all, I'm reasonably happy to be living in 2025 rather than 1975. I can think of things I miss, but they're "ten year old" things like a favorite bicycle or a fun Little League season, things that probably have their equivalents for that age group today.

I don't miss (in most respects) working at a produce market for $1.75 an hour or a gas station for $3.35 an hour or a boat factory for $3.85 an hour (even accounting for inflation, that last one is less than $12 per hour) and getting 12 miles per gallon of gas (on the highway, in my 1974 Oldsmobile Delta 88 with a 455 engine and four-barrel carb ... although I do miss driving that car).

But your mileage may vary. Thus, the poll.