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Old 05-20-2014, 12:57 PM
 
Location: Salinas, CA
15,408 posts, read 6,161,602 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by John-UK View Post
Wasn't New York City just about to go bankrupt in the 1970s?
Yes, it was very close to bankruptcy. The country saved it from that fate. Do not know what the final price tag was, but I am sure our Federal Reserve bank was involved in the process of getting NYC back on its feet financially.

 
Old 05-20-2014, 01:00 PM
 
Location: Oceania
8,610 posts, read 7,854,865 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by STB93 View Post
I would like to know what was it like back in the 1970s decade? I am 20 and I often watch clips and see pictures of what it was like back then but I would like to know from your experiences for what the 1970s were really like?
I was 13 in 1970 and 20 in 1980. My life should be That 70's Show but they wrote the wrong script.

I don't know about the other stuff people put on here because some of it is too cliche.

The assasinations of JFK, MLK and RFK pretty much shook up things as did Vietnam. Those events pretty much dominated headlines along with Watergate. Drugs were in the news because people were experimenting with them more openly than in years past. The late 60s merely opened the door. Music was better because it was real. The space race and cold war was pretty much competition of technology between the USA and USSR. The last real cars made in the US came out in the 60s.
Big afros and long hair was pretty much normal and looked down on more then than now.

This is like asking one to describe the depression. I was born 20 years after that and the mindset was with every adult you knew as they wasted nothing and repaired items rather than buying anew.

You had to be there. Life after 2000 is boring.
 
Old 05-20-2014, 01:06 PM
 
Location: Parts Unknown, Northern California
48,564 posts, read 24,004,388 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by armory View Post
I was 13 in 1970 and 20 in 1980.
How did you manage to age just seven years during a ten year period?
 
Old 05-20-2014, 01:19 PM
 
Location: Salinas, CA
15,408 posts, read 6,161,602 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Grandstander View Post
How did you manage to age just seven years during a ten year period?
Some of the drugs were that strong back then! Just kidding. LOL.
 
Old 05-20-2014, 01:50 PM
 
2,087 posts, read 4,266,563 times
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http://selvedgeyard.com/2009/11/22/u...ization-craze/

mural vans from the 1970's - Google Search

Last edited by leanansidhex; 05-20-2014 at 02:00 PM.. Reason: add
 
Old 05-20-2014, 01:50 PM
 
Location: southern california
61,289 posts, read 87,163,795 times
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a great many people left the country. a good book about it is called "the drifters"
 
Old 05-20-2014, 02:55 PM
 
Location: Shawnee-on-Delaware, PA
7,962 posts, read 7,312,390 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by STB93 View Post
^But at least the 70s gave you Star Wars. That was awesome.
Eh. I prefer Star Trek which is from the 60's.

BTW Star Wars (1977) was the first movie since the Vietnam era to draw clear lines between Good and Evil.
 
Old 05-20-2014, 03:10 PM
 
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From a kid's perspective, it was a pretty bad time overall. The 1970′s were a time of economic, cultural, and political decay, with the Soviet Empire seeming to take over more and more of the world, and *nothing* going right here at home. The zeitgeist of the times was one of unrelenting doom and gloom, and the future just seemed to us smaller kids to be nothing but shortages, rationing, and price inflation (you could watch your allowance money just lose value as prices for kid stuff rose year by year and even seemingly month by month).

Movies and TV of the time were mostly futures of doom and gloom (Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Logan's Run, Silent Running), natural and sometimes man-made disasters (Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, The Posideon Adventure, even movies about killer animals) outlaw anti-heroes (Vanishing Point, countless outlaw truckers vs. corrupt rural sherriffs), or nostalgia for the 1950's and early 1960's, when the future still looked bright (American Graffitti, Happy Days).

Quote:
Originally Posted by jtab4994 View Post
BTW Star Wars (1977) was the first movie since the Vietnam era to draw clear lines between Good and Evil.
Maybe that was why "Star Wars" was so appealing to kids--World War Two-ish good vs. evil, yet set in outer space. Harrison Ford later appearing in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", a throwback to the 1930's and 1940's, with Nazi villians, underscored that theme.

Meanwhile, so many of our parents were divorcing and going off on very odd tangents. I remember asking my parents who still stayed together about a friend who had a "mom's boyfriend", and what did that exactly mean ("Is it like a Dad?", I asked. "Not quite....", my parents awkwardly explained).

I also remember so many parents, coaches, teachers wearing T-Shirts with subtle sexual innuendo like "(certain occupational people) do it (a certain way)". For example "Bankers do it with interest", "Nurses do it with care"....

Last edited by NickB1967; 05-20-2014 at 03:43 PM..
 
Old 05-20-2014, 03:48 PM
 
2,220 posts, read 2,784,771 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by North Beach Person View Post
It did.

The 1970's were a decade of gas lines and rationing. Wage and price controls. Loss of national prestige. No matter your own opinion on the war itself the US abandoned the South Viet Namese, who were promptly conquered by the North. The World looked and saw a country unwilling to honor its agreements.

It was a decade that saw basic industries contract, shut down and when offshoring began in earnest. High inflation coupled with high unemployment and declining GDP combined to erode the standard of living. Interest rates approached 20% for houses and cars. There were serial recessions throughout the decade.

Whomever says that a college degree "guaranteed" a job either didn't live through the time or doesn't have a firm grasp of history.

Watergate eroded trust in the government which continues today.

Not as rosy as others have painted it.
THIS. The future just looked awful then....
 
Old 05-20-2014, 03:53 PM
 
2,220 posts, read 2,784,771 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Litehop743 View Post
As Grandstander mentioned above, it was after the popularization of birth control pills (after about 1965) and prior to the onset of HIV/AIDS. The early 70s even preceded the spread of herpes. In a broader context, it was after the development of antibiotics (WW II), but before the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of STDs. Lots of women were eager to hop in the sack, and (some within 5-20 minutes of meeting as strangers).

-- Still, feelings got hurt, there were matters of honor and self-respect to deal with, and people still took significant-other relationships a lot more seriously than today. Today, we've inched back in the direction of medieval relationships, when economic issues seem to matter more, especially among women.

-- The sexual revolution and other social changes that hit a kind of threshold in the 60s (but which began far earlier) seemed to indicate that a new kind of society had arrived already, and what was uncertain was how it was going to settle in. The early nastiness of second-wave feminism seemed like a bad mood that would settle down after some adjustments were made, and few seemed to anticipate that the nastiness would become institutionalized and lead to delusional ideologies fed by the truth-denying epistemologies of postmodernism. (In the 80s and afterwards, there were feminism-related witch-hunts regarding day-care child abuse cases in which "therapists" and "counselors" broadcast their eagerness to catch "abusers" to children with such hysterical enthusiasm, that the kids told them what they wanted to hear, to the point that many of the young children involved came to believe the "counselors'" version of reality, and convinced themselves that they'd actually been abused. (Later research showed how the powerful abuse-seeking influence of adult authorities could project false memories into children and even adults.) But in the 70s, feminism seemed like the kind of disagreement that normal people have. People fight, they hear, they make adjustments and compromises, and things settle down. That didn't happen with feminism and with some other causes that became professions for some, who needed to justify their jobs on a more permanent basis.

-- Movements shifted from principle-based movements to emotion based movements, from the invocation of high moral principles by people like MLK Jr, to pride movements, but it didn't seem pernicious at the time. The notions that reason and logic could be used in cold and inhumane ways and that passion and emotions were natural and pure were just becoming mainstream, and there was a lot of naivete about them, leading to romanticized expectations for the latter and the beginnings of hyper-credulous critiques of the former, opening the door for the absurdities of postmodernism. (When future centuries come to mock our ignorance in the way we mock the ignorance of the Middle Ages, postmodernism will be Exhibit A.) But none of this was evident yet.

-- The oil crisis in 1973 was a little foreboding, but for young, college-educated people, the new conventional wisdom seemed unassailable and vindicated by Watergate. Tradition was bad, and new, artificial ideologies were good. We could revise history and make a new reality, just as Soviet geneticists proclaimed that acquired traits could affect evolution, and humanity could be changed into the Communist Utopia. Few had the temerity to proclaim it at the time, but those days were the beginnings of the notion that reality is a social construct, without any sense for the qualifications that apply to that doctrine.

-- There was a lot of optimism, but a lot of uncertainty and awkwardness. And a lot less hard-headed cynicism and blaming than there is today. There was a lot of conflict and even violence, but somehow, the tendency to write off one's opponents as irredeemable wasn't there. People still talked and argued. Today, people scoff dismissively and take on postures of outrage, having learned, at least intuitively if they can't explain it, that emotional manipulation is often more effective than reasoning persuasion, because it attacks people at the level of the unconscious, where they're more vulnerable. People still cared about human dignity then, at least a little bit.
THIS too. And the impact has been disastrous.
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