[extropy-chat] can't second guess history

[Olga Bourlin]

From: Ned Late

> I don't think that the decade of the '50s was merely a repressive nightmare.

Well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "repressive nightmare," but widespread housing discrimination, so-called "miscegenation" laws (in some states), lynchings, outright discrimination against gay people (just about everywhere), unequal rights where women were concerned, prayers led by teachers in some public schools, de jure segregation in the Southern states, unequal access to law schools and medical schools (and the like), hardly any diversity in politics, movies, television, books (other than the WASP model), illegal abortions (out of necessity) - coupled with no really effective birth control, no real undertanding, concern or protection against corporal child abuse and sexual child abuse, no protection for women against sexual harrassment in the workplace, the McCarthy witch hunts ... will this do for a start?  Of course, not every family was "repressed" (especially if they conformed and/or were of the "innie" variety), but the repressions - and many nightmares - were cruelly real for many, many people.  

> Besides we're second-guessing history, the '40s were even worse, what with WWII. Perhaps we should have avoided that big ugly war with a pax Germania & pax Nippon?

Well, I wasn't comparing decades - and I was talking principally about life in the United States (not what was happening in Germany, Japan or - horror of horrors - Stalingrad - all undeniably sad episodes in world history), but since you brought this up (and from the American perspective) - certainly, some things got better in the 1950s (e.g., desegregation of the military, polio vaccine was discovered), but some things got worse (women didn't work outside the home as much as they had done in the 1940s).  

Olga

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