Do You Ever Wish...

Salanis wrote: Went to a medical history museum the other week. I'm very happy to be living in the modern era. If I had to go back... eh... the boom of the 1990's was pretty good.

Lol. Thats like going forward and back. What a twist!

Did anybody see the South Park episode "Prehistoric Ice Man" with Larry from 1996?

Cole_Trickle wrote: ....I think that I would fit in great in middle America in the 1950's...

I am guessing you are not black.

I think most people would THINK they would like another time better, but if they had to live it they probably would not. Historical times are generally viewed in a pretty sqewed way. Look at all those romantic movies about the Elizebethan era and such... kissing one of those people (the dental horror), or even smelling most of them (even in the 30's the three stooges joked about taking baths once a week), would be a pretty horrific process for most modern people.

70's are cool, but are also the time of some horrific pollution, gas shortages etc.

Now if you are talking about just the cars, well maybe you can make an argument. But the fact is, today, you can get very fast, very safe, very economical cars (competitively), and STILL get most of the old cars you would want also.

Growing up watching back to the future, always had me thinking about this, but more as a knowing what I know now deal. Growing up then not knowing anything of the future doesn't sound good to me. The future is where I would want to go (unless there is some kind of huge disaster in the future). Maybe to the point where money gets phases out

In reply to aircooled:

Those were the good old days. According to my parent's generation, people (especially kids) never wore seat belts and they were really, really safe because they drove enormous safe cars that were designed to throw kids out the window and softly into a pile of hay in the case of a wreck.

Drinking huge amounts of booze and driving the family around was safe too, apparently. But oddly my parents never talk about that much.

No, the '70's were not perfect. Progress is not all bad, medical progress for instance. The Internet has really been a double edged sword. But damn all this uber safety crap has just gotten out of hand, I mean New York City banning trans fats? Chrissakes, give me a break already. Not to mention the perpetually butthurt types, they are really getting on my nerves with all the whining.

And that is why I call myself a curmudgeon.

I would have liked to have been born in the late 1800's so I'd be old enough to see the early/mid 1900's and the massive explosion of technology, then live long enough to see man land on the moon, and die shortly after with a hopeful optimisim for humanity.

I think it was a Chris Rock with the line "Where could I go? Anything before 1980, no thank you!"

Only white men want to go back in time.

My father is 90 years old, and grew up on a farm. The farm was so far out in the country, that even today there are only dirt roads in that area. So I sometimes wonder what he thinks about when he is trying to "make out" some of the latest technology. When he learned to drive, it was on a wooden wagon pulled by a horse. His stepmother's house had a party line telephone as late as the mid '60s. She considered being able to join in the conversations her neighbors were having on the 'phone as entertainment...but I guess it's not all that different from today's conference calls.

My father's first car was a truck, a Dodge or Chevy (it was so long ago he's not sure which) and it had 4 wheel drum brakes and no power assist, no power assist on the steering, a manual transmission, and no radio or multi-speed heater. For heat, you opened a "flap" into the engine compartment. I'm sure he never imagined back then that there would one day be A/C in cars (most buildings didn't have A/C when he grew up), cars that had cruise control and power windows, much less power brakes and steering.

I grew up in the '50s, and cars "matured" about the same time I did...so I think I was born at the right time.

I do sometimes watch a western on tv and try to imagine what it was like, but back then it was so easy to die of the smallest things. Scratch your arm on a rusty nail or barbed wire fence and you stood a good chance of gangrene/amputation or death from blood poisoning. Food poisoning was so much more prevalent back then.

Travel? What takes hours today, took weeks back then...assuming it was safe to travel. Few bridges meant you might have no place close to cross a river, so a short distance involved a long ride.

My grandmother was born in 1913, she barely remembered the War to End All Wars (yeah, right). After her funeral earlier this year, my daughter and I were talking about all she had seen happen.

The automobile. There were no cars in her town until she was 4 or 5 years old, all her neighbors had horses and buggies. A couple of farmers had big old steam powered tractors. Well, we can see what has happpened.

Airplanes. The Wright brothers flew in 1903; when she was born the aircraft industry was still in its infancy. Airplanes were made of wood and fabric and crashed more often than not. At her death, it was possible to (well, if the Concorde was still operational) cross the Atlantic in a few hours.

Electricity. When she was a little girl, the neighbors 1/2 mile away got electric lights about a year and a half before her family did and she told us they could look through the woods and see the light on their porch burning, they were some kind of anxious to get that.

Indoor plumbing. While it was pretty common in bigger towns, she grew up in Steadman, SC which ain't exactly the bright lights/big city. IIRC they ran on well water and an outhouse till sometime in the late 1920's.

The Great Depression. Steadman wasn't much affected directly since there really wasn't much to lose in the first place and everyone raised their own food, pretty much. She said there were a lot of transients, though. I guess we'd call them homeless persons, they called them hoboes.

World War II. My mom and my aunt had both been born by that time. My grandfather died suddenly in the late 1930's, long before I was born so I didn't get to hear a whole bunch of direct WWII stories. She remarried after the US got into the war, this guy died in the late 1940's.Two of my great uncles were there but neither liked to talk about it. I discovered just this year my Uncle Chalmas was part of the first 'wave' to reach the concentration camps at the end of the Battle of the Bulge. She had some of his letters, with redactions and all.

The Atomic Age. It was a source of pride for her that the US ended the war in as quick a manner as possible. She was a supporter of nuclear energy.

The rise of television. Steadman didn't get but one station, Channel 12 out of Augusta, GA. They called it 'Tall 12' because the tower was really high so the signal would reach all these teeny little hick towns. I don't think she could ever have predicted cable and satellite TV. She had basic cable only at her house and that was mostly because my aunt moved in with her about twelve years ago.

The Cold War. She remembered the Bay of Pigs and the missiles in Cuba, she would talk about 'godless Communists' at times. She thought Ronald Reagan was the greatest ever for putting the squeeze on Gorbachev, but when the wall came down she figured he had screwed up and the Commies would flood Europe. Thankfully she was wrong.

The Korean War. All of my family sort of fell in the too old/too young category so we missed direct invovement in that one.

The civil rights movement: she grew up in a time when 'everyone knew their place.' (BTW, that's not just a Southern thing. My dad's mom was from New York City and felt exactly the same way.) So she saw the rise and fall of the Jim Crow laws, saw women get the right to vote (1920), saw blacks get the right to vote (yeah the amendment guaranteeing blacks the vote was passed in 1870, but the poll tax was not finally 100% abolished until 1964) and saw things such as the Selma church bombings etc unfold before her eyes. It was a wrenching change from her childhood.

The space race: Sputnik was launched in 1957, twelve years later Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. An amazing time, to be sure. She used to be wide eyed at the space station and the shuttle, could not believe what she was seeing.

Kennedy's assasination.

The Vietnam War. She was able to see the US kick ass in the two big wars of the century then slink out of a dinky SE Asia country with its tail between its legs.

Disco. I really wish she hadn't seen/heard that. But she also saw the rise of rock and roll, with Buddy Holly, Elvis (who she thought was scandalous), then the British Invasion. She used to bust on my brothers and I for listening to that crap.

The Twin Towers. I think she really despaired of humanity after that one. Thankfully, she was able to live long enough to see OBL get his.

The rise of the Internet. That happened so late in her life that she had very little knowledge of it and honestly that's probably a good thing.

So what are we gonna see? Hard to tell. I'd say the big milestones have already happened. Gay marriage? Well, sorry but that don't hold a candle to ratifying voting rights for fully 65% of the US population. Flight to Mars? That is a goal worth pursuing but I don't see us getting behind it like we did between 1957-1969.

In reply to Curmudgeon:

That reminds me of this....

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television, North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenberg, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye,

Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen, Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiov, Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron, Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team, Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev, Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez

We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac, Sputnik, Zhou Enlai, Bridge On The River Kwai

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball, Starkweather Homicide, Children of Thalidomide

Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia, Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy, Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo

We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it

Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion

Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatle mania, Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician sex, J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say

We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again, Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock

Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline, Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide, Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law, Rock and Roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore

We didn't start the fire It was always burning since the world's been turning. We didn't start the fire But when we are gone It will still burn on, and on, and on, and on...

In reply to Giant Purple Snorklewacker:

Good tune.

This time has been pretty good to me, but there are a bunch of others I would love to visit as long as I could do it as one of the rich and powerful.

Watching the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Seeing the Roman and Russian empires at their height. The Roaring 20s or seeing the first Saturn V leave the launch pad. I could spend a day making a list.

I guess I need a hot tub.

HiTempguy wrote: I haven't watched this, but it looks so incredibly awesome I am dl'ing it tonight. Love Tarantino!

The first half is great. I shut it off before it ended.

I would like to have grown up in my parents era. They were born in the early 40's, and got to live through the 50's, 60's and 70's in their prime. The three best decades, IMO. Rock and roll, hot rods, muscle cars, the hippy era, and everything the 70's was. I was 18 in 1980, so other than disco, I can think of nothing bad about the 70's.

4cylndrfury wrote: I was riding BMX until it was too dark to see outside up until the early 2000s...I was born in 1980, so...yeah...outside, as a minor, until the streetlights had been on for an hour, in the latter 75% of the 90s, in SW Ohio

We used to go for 3am bike rides in the woods.

It'd be nice if I was born about ten years earlier, if only so I could have cheaper access to the awesome cars I like today, but in retrospect, I'd probably just wish I was born 10 years earlier than that because of different cars, and so on and so forth.

Best thing to do is just enjoy the now - you can't have the back then anymore, and you might not get the later.

In reply to Zomby Woof:

I graduated grade school in 1976 and I do remember getting tired of everything being tagged with the Spirit of '76. In high school some dude had a S.O. '76 Vega.

I sometimes wish I was in the market back in 1967 when Datsun was selling their 1,000 Datsun 2000 Roadsters new. Or the 1970 240z.

Otto Maddox wrote: Those were the good old days. According to my parent's generation, people (especially kids) never wore seat belts and they were really, really safe because they drove enormous safe cars that were designed to throw kids out the window and softly into a pile of hay in the case of a wreck.

My mom went headfirst through the windshield of a Chevette the year before I was born. I have no idea what it's like to not wear a seatbelt.

(scratch that - I had to drive an overpowered '34 Ford that did not have such devices in it. MAN that felt spooky)

I still geek out sometimes that my mom rode in a Chevette in the mid-late 70s. I have a soft spot for those cars, shame that they're all gone.

I don't think I would want to live in another age. I remember using a party line phone at home, going to the neighbor's to watch that new-fangled thing called TV on a 7" round screen and many of the things on Curmudgeon's list.

Spent a lot of time out playing in the woods with the neighbor kids. Evenings we listened to the radio or read books (lots of books).

I'd like to travel to 2100. after the zombie apocalypse has ran it's course. population is low and things are just starting to be rebuilt

Toyman01 wrote: The Roaring 20s or seeing the first Saturn V leave the launch pad.

Can't help you with the `20s, but the first Saturn 5 launch was documented..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cke5ly4mZo

Scroll to about 5min 30sec for the rocket porn..