Comment by lqet
4 years ago
> what seems like such a simpler, happier time
I am regularly watching historic news footage (1950s and 1960s) from the archives of my local TV station. While the people are indeed friendlier than today (and much more eloquent), they don't seem happier. They don't seem less stressed. The general problems are the same. I watched a bit from 1961 about the growing problem of extreme weather events (they discussed whether the atomic bomb was responsible). Another bit from 1962 reported youth crime at an all time high and blamed alcohol, sex and movies. They showed 15 years old tricking themselves into student clubs in Heidelberg to consume alcohol and drugs. A few weeks ago, I watched a bit about the Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1969 (40.000 deaths in Germany alone) where they discussed countermeasures like quarantine and closing schools.
Also, a national TV station here shows "News from 20 years ago", where they just show the entire evening news from exactly 20 years ago. I have been watching this for years now, often while I am walking around the room. Just from the audio, it is often very hard to decide whether the news is from today or from the 90ies. The topics are often the same: politicians accusing each other of X, party Y announcing they now do X, violent conflicts in X, latest election polls, fear of war in Y.
When I watch these bits, I often think of these lines from the Joan Baez song "Hello in There" [0]:
Me and Loretta, we don't talk much more
She sits and stares through the back door screen
All the news just repeats itself
Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen
I used to regularly dig through news archives from 100 yrs ago, and I found a lot of similarities with the news today. I totally get what you're saying.
I watched the documentary called 1968 on HBO. It made me wonder if people knew they were in the middle of one of the most impactful years in American history (MLK and RFK assassinated, sentiment shift regarding Vietnam, Nixon elected, etc). I then realized that 2020 would be viewed in time in a similar fashion. It was somewhat comforting knowing that we’ve pushed through tumult in the past, and that we’re still perfectly capable of doing so.
It’s so easy to lose the context of our place in history when there’s a constant stream of voices all pointing and screaming at the “now”.
Compared to having an actual dictatorship in Iberia (two), and later ETA/IRA/Far right bombings, the Gladio network, and then fucking wars in Jugoslavia, that's nothing.
I used to listen to car bombs near where I live.
My mother (who spent most of that year pregnant with me) certainly felt that that year was probably the worst she'd experienced.