There was never normal
I came to America in the early fifties. Unlike some who arrived after the war by boat, or plane, I slipped in by birth. The sun was shining on America in those days. The U.S. had recently won a well-publicized war, we were flush with cash, opportunity and ambition. There was no shortage of ideas, muscle or the political will to make our many dreams one happy reality. Beaver and Wally Cleaver lived just down the road, our father (everyone had one in those days) always knew best, and your mom’s friend Donna Reed could whip up a mean apple pie in the kitchen.
Those days are gone. But it hasn’t stopped a parade of hind-sighters who desperately lament those by gone days when life seemed to be normal. You can almost see the Rockwellian paradise in Rick Santorum’s voice. All of those folks who lament the good old days of family values, seem to forget that the nineteen fifties as we remember those years, happened mostly on TV.
In the fifties, America was almost as racist the in the eighteen sixties, in the fifties, some of you might recall blacks couldn’t share civil life with whites, there was something called segregation, which permeated southern life and echoed throughout the country. Even as late as 1974, school busing issues even in Yankee Massachusetts revealed America’s not-so-suppressed racism.
In the fifties, and your birth control didn’t work for you or you found yourself underage and with a pregnancy, your God-fearing parents, didn’t often offer to help raise your child with the support of a sympathetic community. Instead, you were probably whisked away in the middle of the night to an undisclosed Ohio location for an abortion, or maybe to Aunt Clara’s upstate farm where you remained until your pregnancy came to term; at which point, the baby was swiftly given up for adoption. Just another one of those good old family values Rick Santorum seems to ignore.
In the fifties and if you were gay, you’d probably rather be a pregnant teenager. Today we talk about gays ‘coming out’; a reference to the complete phrase ‘coming out of the closet.’ That‘s because during the fifties most gays were hiding in any closet they could find. From intense social ostracizing, to felony laws in some states, to threats to one’s personal safety, the gay community hid in the shadows of society, and became dirty open secret because our country soiled itself with its homophobia and ignorance.
The fifties was the decade just before we had a Presidential assassination, a history changing civil rights movement, an illegal war fabricated out of demagoguery and hubris, a generational schism of historic proportions and a near nuclear war. If those bobby socks days were so perfect, we wouldn’t have experienced the sixties. There was never normal. – Krotchett
