What was the last 1T like?

[Eric the Green]

(03-16-2022, 12:11 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: Like most millennials, I clash a bit with boomers over a few issues, but at the same time, from what I do know about the immediate post war period...it's hard not to empathize a little. When you consider that societal values tend to spawn most intensely in a 2T, and that Civics tend to pass on values primarily from the Idealist midlifers around when they were growing up, it means not only strongly enforced conformity, but growing up with values originating 3 turnings (like 60-70 years) ago. 

So I guess the question is: what was it like back then? Did you like it better then? Better now? In what ways did you feel constrained?

Good question. I guess my opinion would be pretty obvious. But these days I have a bit of nostalgia for those 1T times; there was a certain stability and reliability about those days, simpler and easy to understand. These days, in our current 4T, so much that is new bewilders me, and I don't know the culture here in the USA any better than someone from Russia or even Mars, unless it's the older stuff. And the constant social and tech changes get to me, and the tendency to prefer virtual life to real life disturbs me. I don't think I like the current times any better than the 1T time. We're even supposed to be able to make important and beneficial world and institutional changes in a 4T, and that's still being blocked after 40 years of stagnation. These times are downright infuriating, and we are all at severe risk. At least in the 1T, the times were a drag, but they were comfortable, at least if you were a white and middle class young guy. Although, come to think of it, the nuclear cloud was darkening over our heads in the 1T, and that cast a shadow.

But I so much preferred the 2T times, and the early 3T times, to the 1T time. I did feel stifled to an extent during the 1T, and I was occasionally pilloried for being not the macho man type. Only certain kinds of people were accepted then, and others either were put into the closet or afraid to be their real selves. The 2T was very liberating. People burst forth with new life and could let things flow. The pop culture was great, so much better than either today or during the 1T time, and life and the people you met were more interesting than before. I felt a part of something going on that was bigger. Real genuine concerns were raised and futures were envisioned. From Oct.1962 to Sept.2001, peace on earth seemed to be a developing trend.

In the 1T, the horizons of our imagination were extremely limited about what we could aspire to or learn about. The stiff macho image of male pop stars and other phony straight types in both sexes was very noticeable and unattractive, just as the contrast between extreme sexual party pop culture and sexual suppression is so noticeable in these times and in the late 3T. In the 2T times, the pop culture was incredibly rich and genuine, beyond anything I could have imagined before it happened, and it made me feel those were my times. Later on in the 2T, I also felt some pressure to be more liberated than I was, and some people wanted from me more than I was often willing or able to accept or allow. In the 1T there was pressure to conform; in the 2T there was pressure to be groovy, hang loose and be wild. But on the whole, of course, I'd live in a 2T and would rather stay there.