Where Did My World Go?

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

I remember when there was no tamper-proof and child-proof packaging.  That was before multiculturalism and Identity Politics when we could still trust one another and parents accepted responsibility for their children without fobbing it off on a company with a liability claim.

I remember also when there were no state income and sales taxes.  States were able to meet their responsibilities without them.

A postage stamp cost one cent. A middle class house was $11,000 and an upper middle class house went fot $20,000.  One million dollars was a large fortune. There were no billionaires.

The air museum on the naval base in Pensacola, Florida, has a street reconstructed from the 1940s. The restaurant’s memu offers a complete evening meal for 69 cents.

I was thinking about that as I reviewed a recent Publix supermarket bill:  a loaf of bread $3.89, a dozen organic eggs $4.95, a package of 6 hot dogs $5.49, 8 small tomatos $5.19, a package of baby spinach $4.19, a half gallon of milk $4.59, a package of two paper towel rolls $5.99.  When I was 5 or 6 years old, my mother would send me to the bakery with a dime for a loaf of bread or to the market with 11 cents for a quart of milk. The Saturday afternoon double-feature at the movie house was 10 cents. 

A case of Coca-Colas (24 bottles) was one dollar. Ten cents would get you a Pepsi Cola and a Moon Pie, lunch for construction crews. Kids would look for discarded Pepsi Cola bottles on construction sites. In those days there was a two cent deposit on soft drink bottles. One bottle was worth 4 pieces of Double Bubble gum.  Five bottles paid for the Saturday double-feature.

Dimes, quarters, and half dollars were silver, and there were silver dollars. The nickle (five cent coin) was nickle, and the penny was copper. FDR took gold away in 1933. The silver coins disappeared in 1965.  Our last commodity money, the copper penny, met its demise in 1983.  Now they are talking about getting rid of the penny altogether.

Many of us grew up with paper routes for spending money.  Other than a paper route, my first employment was the high school summer when I worked the first shift in a cotton mill for $1 an hour.  And work it was.  After the withholding tax my takehome pay for the 40 hour week was $33.

When I was five years old I could walk safely one mile to school and home by myself without my parents being arrested by Child Protective Services for child neglect and endangerment.

In school we could draw pictures of fighter planes, warships, and guns without being regarded as a danger to our classmates and sent for psychiatric evaluation.  Fights were just a part of growing up. The police weren’t called, and we weren’t handcuffed and carted off to jail. Today kids who play cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians and point fingers at one another as pretend guns end up in police custody. A fight means an assault charge and possibly a felony record.

The kind of freedom I had as a child no longer exists except in remote rural areas. When I think about this I wonder if kids today even notice.  They live in the virtual world of the video screen and do not know the real world.  Catching crawfish in the creek while watching out for cottonmouth moccasins, playing capture the flag over acres of expanse without getting a bad case of poison ivy, organizing a neighbohood ball game, damning up a creek and making a swimming hole. Today these are unknown pleasures.

When it rained we read books. I remember reading Robert Heinlein’s Puppet Masters when I was 12 years old. Do 12 year olds read books today?  Can science fiction compete with video games?

I remember when a deal rested on a handshake.  Today lawyers tell me even contracts are unenforceable.

We were taught to behave properly so that “you can look yourself in the mirror.”  Today you can’t look yourself in the mirror unless you have upstaged or ripped off someone.  Character is a thing of the past, as are habits that are today regarded as inappropriate.  An older person hoping to get a point across to a younger one would put his or her hand on the younger person’s arm or thigh for attention purposes.  Do this today and you get a sexual charge. Both of my grandmothers would probably be locked up as sexual offenders.

Being a tattle-tale was an undesirable and discouraged trait. Today we are encouraged to be tattle-tales.  You will hear the encouragement several dozen times while awaiting your flight to be called.  Neighbors on quiet cul-de-sacs will call Child Protective Services to report one another’s unsupervised children at play.

I remember when black Americans said they just wanted to be treated like everyone else.  That was before racial set-asides in federal government contracts that only black-owned firms can bid on. Once you have special privileges, you don’t want to be like everyone else.  Blacks say being white is a privilege.  If so, it wasn’t enough privilege for Celeste Bennett’s firm Ultima.  Her white privilege and her gender privilege were trumped by black set-aside privilege.

If my parents and grandparents were to be resurrected, they would require a year’s training before it would be safe for them to go about with being arrested.  They would have to be educated out of their customary behavior patterns and taught the words and phrases that are today impermissable.  They would have trouble comprehending that there are no-go areas in cities.  Reading Diana Johnstone’s masterful book, Circle in the Darkness, I remembered the safety of my own youthful years as I read that as a 12 year old she could walk alone around the wharfs of southwest Washington, D.C., in the 1940s unmolested.

I received my new homeowners policy yesterday.  It arrived with 89 pages of warnings, definitions, and liability explanations.  One can’t really tell if one is insured or not.

I have a 54-year old Jaguar that I have had for 47 years. The owner’s manual tells how to operate and repair the car. A friend showed me the owner’s manual on his 21-year old Porsche. It has more pages of warnings to protect the manufacturer from liability claims than the Jaguar manual has pages of instruction. Today any tool or gadget you buy has more pages of warnings than instruction.

My AARP Medicare supplement insurance policy arrived explaining my meager and expensive covering.  It came with a notice letting me know that language assistance services are available for the policy in Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Russian, Arabic, Haitian Creole, French, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese,  Hmong, Llocano, Somali, Greek, Gujarati, and that there is no discrimination because of sex, age, race, color, disability or national origin. The notice provides access to a Civil Rights Coordinator in the event I feel discriminated against.  AARP even provides a number to call for help with filing a discrimination complaint.

I do feel discriminated against. But it is not a covered discrimination. I feel like my country has been stolen or that I have been kidnapped and placed in some foreign unknown place that I don’t recognize as home.

I feel the same when I get fundraising appeals from Georgia Tech and Oxford University. Georgia Tech was an all male school consisting primarily of in-state Georgia boys.  The Oxford colleges were segregated according to gender—male and female—and the vast majority of the members were British. 

Today all the colleges except the women’s are gender integrated. White males seldom appear in the photos in the fundraising materials that arrive from Oxford and Georgia Tech.  I see lots of women and racial diversity and wonder what university it is.  An improvement or not, they are not the schools of which I have memories.  The schools I knew have simply been taken away.  Something else is there now.

Perhaps it has always been true, but today if you live very long you outlive your world. As your friends die off, no one remembers it correctly but you as you watch your world disappear in misrepresentations to serve present day agendas.

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22winmag - TBP's Yankee Mormon KJV Bible Critic

Enough already with the boomer-bedtime-story, memory-lane shit.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Says the ignorant slacker……

Wait young padawan…..there will come a time…but you’ll have nothing good to look back on I fear 🙂

But I do appreciate your “deep sensitivity” about the generation that brought you up…..

Henry (Enrique Covarrubias)
Henry (Enrique Covarrubias)

Paddywack doesn’t even believe in Boomers, like Elvis, they left the building a long time ago.

jaykay
jaykay

you didn’t have to read it 😉

Anonymous
Anonymous

Your comments make you very punchable.

Done in Dallas
Done in Dallas

FOAD!

Jimbo
Jimbo

GET OFF MY LAWN!

YourAverageJoe
YourAverageJoe

Goodnight Karen.

Henry (Enrique Covarrubias)
Henry (Enrique Covarrubias)

32 downers? I’m so jealous. That means you have arrived on TBP, a force to be reckoned with and taken seriously.

Llpoh
Llpoh

EC – not necessarily. Sometimes things are exactly as they seem. Sometimes a fucking retard is just a fucking retard, and the thumbs simply acknowledge that fact. And in this case, he is a fucking retard.

Henry (Enrique Covarrubias)
Henry (Enrique Covarrubias)

LLPOH, except for TC, winnie’s cohort is seriously messed up. Unless my Boomerness is to blame for not seeing things their way. I actually grew up with self-esteem deficiencies that drove me to find answers so it’s hard for me to understand their self-entitled gimme, gimme outlook.

Coalclinker
Coalclinker

Man, you need to either pour yourself a cup of strong coffee and put some whiskey in it, or fix you a Coca Cola with whiskey in it. Oops- I forgot you’re not supposed to do that.

AL Tru
AL Tru

You probably can’t spit past your chin. you can’t Google a video for that.

Panzerlied

I guess you’ve clearly provided the answer to the question “Is everyone here an asshole, or just you. I guess that makes you the winner.

Question Mark
Question Mark

PCR was born in 1939. He’s not a Boomer.

22winmag - TBP's Yankee Mormon Shit-poster

Didn’t say he was.

He writes boomer-bedtime stories for boomers.

Sort of like a poor-man’s Pat Buchanan.

Anonymous
Anonymous

LOL..Hey 22 Winmag …how does it feel to be that fucking stupid?? So stupid the whole world laughs at you? A ha ha ha ha ha …hear me laugh !!

Auntie Kriest
Auntie Kriest

Indeed, PCR, having been born, raised and lived in another time, I can concur that this ideal America is dead and gone. The anecdotes and recollections serve to remind the reader that a great civilization was extant here in the 20th century and to also provide a gauge as to where the nation is at this time.

Being sentimental is fine but the road ahead is going to require very tough men and women, like the people who conquered the land over four centuries and built a once very great nation.

Steve
Steve

I can’t deny it, it was a better world as far as I’m concerned. We would be gone all day, coming home when the sun dropped. Rarely watched TV. We did things like work on our bikes and lawnmower engines for work or go-karts. We used to get $2 to cut and edge neighbors homes and we felt as rich as kings.
Fishing meant grabbing your pole and stopping off at the tackle store for shrimp, live pilchards or frozen cut bait on the way to the beach. Florida now has 6-7 ? different fishing licenses, everything has size limits and seems like whatever you want to fish for is out of season.
By the time I was 11 I knew how to drive a car or pickup with standard transmission, a motorcycle and a John Deere tractor.
Life was simple, cheap, fun and something amazing or funny was always around the corner.
Now? Not so much. Too many rules and regulations because as Eric Peters always reminds us, it’s for our saaaaafety.
Yup, you can never go home.

Anonymous
Anonymous

When good was good and evil was bad, very bad. Pointing that out now is considered being judgmental the worse kind of evil…. even stupidity has found a place at the table now.

robb88

as my dad would say[b. 1908] when men were men and women were damned proud of it.

RogerP
RogerP

There is an upside. The rulers of this place have removed any allegiance or fealty to their rule.

Anonymous
Anonymous

But the restaurants! So many great restaurants! Plus, back then, you were all racists. Today, because of all the social changes, nobody calls White people racist.

White Noise
White Noise

And the pussy was better back then.

Llpoh
Llpoh

Yes, cats were allowed to roam free and hunt rodents. Much better system.

Doug
Doug

So you’re that old???

Anonymous
Anonymous

Everybody knows that it’s an RC cola and a moon pie.

Henry (Enrique Covarrubias)
Henry (Enrique Covarrubias)

3V cola and a moon pie.

Auntie Kriest
Auntie Kriest

A grape Nehi with that Moon Pie is also Hoyle.

Roger Jones
Roger Jones

The original Orange Crush wasn’t too shabby either.

Coalclinker
Coalclinker

All of the old soft drinks did taste better because they were made with “real cane sugar”, lol.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Now it’s stevia or sucralose. I can’t stand the stuff.
Stevia is too sweet and sucralose is an additive in house paint. Both taste like crap.
Only an obsessive compulsive idiot who’s afraid of “too much sugar”or fixated on “zero calories” would ever bother with this garbage.

YourAverageJoe
YourAverageJoe

I get all nostalgic when I watch an old Leave It to Beaver episode.
The kids looked at parents as the final authority, respected and revered the teachers, were free to come and go, and were safe and secure.
And White.

Henry (Enrique Covarrubias)
Henry (Enrique Covarrubias)

How do you know all that, Nigga?

Roger Jones
Roger Jones

Worked with a lady who, whenever she would be a presenter at a meeting, would say “Guess I’ve got to put on my June Cleaver dress for tomorrow’s meeting”.

BL
BL

Yet again, I blame the damn tv. You can watch this society degrade over time since it became an addition to every American household.

Beautify America, kill your tv.

Anonymous
Anonymous

How about keeping the tv and getting rid of Hollywood?

Lee Harvey Griswald
Lee Harvey Griswald

But what would you watch besides Hollywood reruns?

Anonymous
Anonymous

Where Did My World Go?

Hitler asked that same question and the longing for days past mimicked those here.

Anonymous
Anonymous

So do the rest of us go buy some hobnailed boots and practice goose stepping?
Asking for a friend … and umm, cosplay.

credit
credit

“Do 12 year olds read books today? ”
proud to say my 12 year old gdaughter reads one per day. she just read Ender’s Game.

Anonymous
Anonymous

I remember 10 kids piling in the back of a pickup truck,and dad would try to shake us out at 30MPH LOL..never lost one of us.Today that would be 10 counts of Attempted murder

TC
TC

Your country has been stolen, Paul. We all know by whom, but few dare say it.

Quartermain

I thought his sub-title ‘Change Is Not Always Progress’ was a better title.

22winmag - TBP's Yankee Mormon Shit-poster

“Where did my world go?”

More like “Where did my car keys go?”

This boomer-nostalgia, early-Alzheimers, memory-lane shit is like throwing gasoline on the fired-up TBP retiree crowd.

Please refer to my 1st comment and do your part to make it triple-digit down votes.
comment image

jaykay
jaykay

why do you want to throw water on the fire?
don’t you see that the age of Kali is at hand?

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