Peace of Mind in America is gone.

[Raven]

There was a time in this country when if you did a good job and worked hard you kept your job and were rewarded for your work. You pretty much knew you could pay your bills and feed, clothe and educate your children. If you invested in the Stock Market with a company like IBM or AT&T, you were pretty confident in a growth in your investment and money for retirement. Your government didn't spy on you or create wars. We didn't have a mercenary force that was just as capable of taking over this Country as it was fighting for us on foreign soil. When getting to a doctor and getting decent care was a given, not a crap shoot.When watching the news on TV meant that you got the news, straight and reasonably unbiased.

I could go on but I won't. What did dawn on me tonight was that what we have really lost...what I have lost, is peace of mind. Maybe that is translated into confidence that our government:
- truly represents our interests
- exists to serve us
- knows what its doing

I have worked hard all of my life, saved, been careful...done all the things I was supposed to do. I have enough money saved to retire and live a decent life into my old age but I have no peace of mind because, in this country, at this time, it could all go away. Peace of Mind, I think is all that we really strive for when we get to be my age. Sad, sad, sad. When I hear Obama say that we have "limited funds for the jobless" I hear defeat of the dream and the expectation that all of have in this country. Peace of Mind...a fleeting dream.

[ZombieHorde]

1. "There was a time in this country when if you did a good job and worked hard..."

When was this time?

[eleny]

4. Pretty much after WWll

My folks worked in a factory sewing pockets and put my brother and I through college. Sure, they were thrifty. But during the 1960s things could be pretty good for working class people.

[Caliman73]

31. Yep. I think that is was only around the time from right after WWII to the 70's

So about 30 or so years that there was a feeling of prosperity. I would also point out that the feeling did not extend to everyone, especially closer to the 70's and 80's. I think that there is always a nostalgia that people seem to have about a time when things were better, and in this case, yes they were. Unions had a good strong position, corporations were still sort of kept in check, and how hard you worked could possibly get you a ways down the road.

Funny thing is that you go back 10 to 30 years and we were racked by the Depression, before then there was no safety net for older people or those who became disabled. We were fairly agrarian, and had not national infrastructure. Flash forward to the 70's and we are crippled by oil embargo, inflation is crazy and there is a sense of malaise.

We had a window where we were riding high, but greedy bastards couldn't just leave well enough alone, and they screwed it all up.

[Raven]

5. Seem to me it was back in the 60's and 70's. Companies like IBM and AT&T were stable

then...maybe it was in the 50's. All I know is that folks who worked for companies then had an expectation that if they did their jobs they would do OK.

[HipChick]

15. One word - Outsourced

[Knight Hawk]

26. A better word

Greed

[stevedeshazer]

17. Up until about the Nixon administration, you could make it.

My parents raised a family with only my dad working. Mom stayed at home.

My brother and I had a decent public education, taxes were low, because the better off among us shouldered a higher burden of taxes -- in other words, progressive taxation -- and the system worked.

This is not to say that the time when I grew up, the fifties and sixties, were all sunshine and lollipops. My family is white; if you weren't you were still down, much more so than today. And to be known as homosexual then was sometimes even dangerous. We've made some social progress, but that is from within.

The external factors imposed by today's corporate crooks kills families. It's making the middle class disappear. There was a time when I thought we were middle class; owned a small house free and clear, you could find a decent paying job in the small town I grew up in, even bought a new car.

Raven describes this time in her OP, and I remember it too. It really happened.

Now, peace of mind seems very far away.

[KG]

41. 1946-1979 aprox* - Reganism destroyed this country.

*applies to white males.

[kenny blankenship]

57. And it continues to.

[eleny]

67. I was born in '46 and agree with that time frame

[Jamastiene]

2. K&R

[FrenchieCat]

3. Those times were gone long ago......

by December 2000, at the very least.

[Raven]

7. I think so. A man I knew for many years was a director for AT&T.

Here's the difference: he attended monthly meeting in NYC of that Company and got $100 for each meeting. That was it. He used to talk about what was n the best interests of the shareholders. When that changed, everything changed.

[slampoet]

6. I made a deal with America, But the USA welched on its word.

So why should i spend the rest of my life with a liar?

[Raven]

9. Brings me to tears. How far we have come...or gone.

[RKP5637]

8. Exactly Correct!!! It used to be as you say, but now you never know day to day just

how far this country is falling apart and over years it has become dysfunctional, and who knows where it's ending. I had planned a comfortable reasonable fair retirement, but that all went to hell. I did ALL of the right things too!

[Speck Tater]

10. That was the Golden Age of America. Prior to about 1945 none of those things were true.

Go back to the mid to late 1800's and the media was openly and blatantly biased. There were Republican newspapers and Democratic newspapers. Objectivity was NOT the order of the day, pushing the party line was.

There were no unions to speak of and the robber barons pretty much treated the workers anyway they pleased, including firing them without cause and without warning.

The time you speak of was a very short-lived period in American history when the possibility of continued economic growth and prosperity still existed. Now those conditions no longer apply. Resources are running short, population is booming everywhere in the world overloading the labor markets, globalization has priced the American worker out of the market. The reason why things are not so rosy today is simply that they very special conditions necessary to support that way of life only existed for a brief span of time, and those conditions are gone, never to return.

[Raven]

12. Is it impossible to bring those conditions back?

[Speck Tater]

14. Sure it's possible. Cut our population in half and then wait 2 million years for more oil to form.

We are in what ecologists call "overshoot". We have too many people consuming too few remaining non-renewable resources. Realistically, those are problems that cannot be fixed on one small planet, and we have yet to find another virgin earth to colonize and plunder.

[FiveGoodMen]

22. Only by taking power back from the rich

[Cerridwen]

11. For.certain.white.men.

I am so very tired of posts about the "good old days" that were good old days for only a select few.

Yay, some of the middle-class people had the American Dream™ while damned near everyone else could suck lemons.

It was a very select few and most of them were portrayed on TV by another select few. "June Cleaver," yeah, she was a working mom.

The "good old days" is a marketing $ucce$$. For the other majority, the "good old days" sucked.

Oh, and by the way, Horatio Alger wrote fiction.

[Raven]

Well, I'm a white woman who faced enormous odds in the mans'

world. I was a single parent as well. Don't fucking lecture to me!

[Cerridwen]

19. So am I. So did I. Wanna compare scars?

Oh, wait, you did. You were a single parent. The honored among honored. Those of us who didn't go that route had more "fun" to play with. Wanna know how many single moms I helped out by taking their holiday hours so they could be with their families? Naw. That's just hierarchy of privilege.

Now, you wanna own up to how much privilege you enjoyed for being white of a certain class?

[Raven]

21. Nope, don't want to compare scars. Just talking about peace of mind...

kind of a concept that crosses all lines. Just don't personally attack me based on some steriotype, OK?

[Cerridwen]

25. That was not a personal attack.

That was a post saying I'm tired of people talking about the "good old days" that for a whole lot of the population, never were.

It's getting old seeing people on DU posting as though this crap hasn't gone on forever because in their world, it's new.

It ain't new. It's old. It's the freaking American Way. Hell, it's based on the "British Way."

[Knight Hawk]

40. British Way?

O yeah and the Chinese,Russian,German,French ,Spanish,Persian ,Polish etc.etc.etc. ways are much better? More than any other peoples of the last thousand years the English have done the most to civilize an uncivil world in my reading of history and in my humble opinion.

[Cerridwen]

In quotes. We inherited a lot from Britain. Our laws. Our

prejudices. Our views on many societal "norms." The "Magna Carta." Class structure.

Define "civilize."

[stevedeshazer]

35. Don't let 'em tell you it never happened.

I lived it, too. I know damned well it did.

[Cerridwen]

48. For whom? n/t

[leftstreet]

16. +1

:applause:

[TCJ70]

68. When referenced today, is it really that hard...

...to see that maybe the people doing the referencing want that today for all people? Sheesh. I doubt the OP really wants to return to the good ol' days as they exactly were.

[Cerridwen]

69. I presume Raven thinks as you've posted. However, (ya knew it was coming),

to see the "gold old days" as they never were denies the history of all those who never experienced them. It obscures how about 90% of us have been manipulated into thinking there was a "good old days" that never existed.

It is cruel to leave well-meaning and good-hearted people in ignorance of things that happened outside their sphere of existence.

We do not learn from the past by pretending it did not happen.

We do not create a better world for all by attempting to recreate a myth.

[Skittles]

13. Raven nails it

yes indeed

[Better Today]

18. a mouthful. +1

[bridgit]

20. Fair enough, rec5, I do think that as this so-called 'republic for which it stands' undergoes...

it's pugnacious reconfiguration we see all around us between what matters, what matters less and what does not matter at all: it provides some with an opportunity to review their understanding of what peace of mind is for them/in the now - and configure themselves as near to peace of mind as is possible

[villager]

23. Well put. There is no Peace of Mind, and no faith in the future

or real belief that there is a future -- at least, one recognizable to us.

Perhaps those are all different ways of saying the same thing...

[stevietheman]

24. What's happening is that the post-WWII bubble is just about gone.

The world is equalizing with us, and we have to deal on their level now. I say this as a non-partisan thing -- it's just reality.

[Raven]

I think you are right. We live in a larger world but we haven't adjusted.

we still think we are the be all and end all. That concept is what fucked us up, I think.

[stevietheman]

44. Agreed. We are going through a UK-style deflation, but...

I think we as a country are less mentally equipped to deal with it.

[phasma ex machina]

66. The spoils of winning a world war it seems in retrospect. nt

[stevietheman]

72. Exactly. The American people were spoiled for decades after WWII.

And now we're crashing and realizing we have to build up a lot of new wealth from scratch, if it can be built up at all.

[RagAss]

27. Because we fucking let it happen.

[blues90]

60. The only peace of mind I have is the few hours I sleep at night

I worked through half the 60's and through the 70's and that was still a time where you could find work and get by. There were always industrial areas with signs posted out front with job openings listed and most offered on the job training even if it was packing truck parts in crates. You did not need more than a high school degree to work even for the post office or bell telephone which I did.

This is not to say at all that equal rights were applied but they were beginning to.

I never made a lot of money but I did have a trade , because they used to say" you can always fall back on a trade" well not anymore.

I do feel we were closer then to a better future than we are now if we had stayed with the program and built on it. We certainly did not read about and hear about all these diseases we see today. I did not see people sleeping on the streets or tent cities. Yes hobos and a few town drunks.

You did have to replace everything because it broke in a year or less.

No it was far from perfect and if it were not for Vietnam just perhaps it would have been so much closer to good. Just that one horror we could have done without might have made today nothing like it is now.

[RagAss]

71. Good Post !

[cali]

28. not this again.

this made up, golden glowing never existed past America reminds me of a stinkin' Thomas Kincaide painting.

[Raven]

32. Not made up. Were you there? There was a time when corporate

heads were moral and ethical and had investors' interests at heart. I was there. Why do you want to tear down the fact that it may have existed?

[cali]

43. Yes, I was there and as someone upthread pointed out

for large swaths of the population; for blacks, for women and for others, things weren't so rosy.

[tonysam]

56. It was called the social contract. I think some of the younger posters

really don't understand there was such a thing, and that union contracts were honored, and that companies actually cared about employees or provided good jobs and wages for fear of unionization. The PATCO strike was a turning point in unions, although they were already starting to decline.

[cali]

29. not this again.

this made up, golden glowing never existed past America reminds me of a stinkin' Thomas Kincaide painting.

[Name removed]

30. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[leftstreet]

33. ...

:popcorn:

[Raven]

37. What does ... mean?

[Raven]

34. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I thought I was dreaming or demented!

[cali]

36. you're calling me a troll, Ms. July '09?

That's amusing. As you're brand spanking new here, I'll inform you that calling someone a troll is against the rules. I suggest you edit your post or the mods will delete it.

I lived through it too, and I'm not so oblivious of history as you are.

[Fire1]

59. Preach it, cali!!!! And THANK YOU!!! n/t

[tonysam]

38. Sorry, but it did. n/t

[Raven]

39. Yes it did.

[tonysam]

42. From 1945-1975 the American Dream was a reality

for millions of families. Then everything changed, and not for the better.

[cali]

Not if you were black it wasn't. And for most of that time it didn't exist

for women either.

[Cerridwen]

46. Again. For whom? n/t

[tonysam]

49. If you are talking about minorities, no, but it sure as hell was for the vast majority

I lived through it. My parents provided for all of us kids; we never wanted for anything. By the way, there were seven of us kids, and my mom didn't have to work. Many, many other people I went to school with were from large families and did fine.

Let's quit trying to distort reality here.

[Cerridwen]

53. So, for you and yours.

Too bad, so sad for those "pesky" minorities, huh?

Please define "vast majority."

[leftstreet]

47. 1945 > on wiped out American Working Class solidarity

How can you not see this?

[tonysam]

50. The working class had great solidarity as did the middle class until

the mid-1970s, actually with the Arab oil embargo from 1973, I believe it was, which really was the beginning of the end of the US as millions of us know it. Let's quit distorting the truth.

[leftstreet]

55. Ah...so you differentiate between the classes?

You don't believe 'middle' class people were actually 'working' class people?

You don't think Middle Class was just a mindset?

:popcorn:

[tonysam]

58. They were ALL workers, whether blue collar or white collar.

Doesn't matter. Most people, meaning men, were able to earn enough to support their families. Cut out the shit that times weren't better during 1945-1975. They were, and a hell of a lot better for more people.

Anybody who believes times are better now needs to have his or her head examined.

[Cerridwen]

62. Have you read any history not in the "approved canon" of the US?

Working classes were pitted against each other; men against women, white men against non-white men, white women against non-white women, "upper" class against "lower" class, ad nauseum.

The "solidarity" you see was an illusion as we were being torn apart with stories of worthy workers versus lazy, immoral "others."

It $ell$, but it was a myth. A myth used to keep people in line.

[Cerridwen]

45. For whom? n/t

[tonysam]

51. You already had your question answered. Stop it. n/t

[Cerridwen]

54. Not at the time I posted that, I hadn't. Though the answer was a bit

narrow in its scope.

[cali]

52. I'll answer that: For white men. n/t

[blues90]

64. For SOME white men.

I am a white male and there is a club you must join or you are not going to have an easy time. You had to laugh at the insane jokes of all kinds , be into sports, treat women like second class citizens and so on . I chose not to join that club and trust me you find walls put up.

[Cerridwen]

65. Of a certain class or classes.

Okay, this is the second time, I think, you and I have agreed. Shouldn't there be a planetary explosion or something? LOL

[branders seine]

61. killed by the wealthy

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

63. Unemployment in 1955 was 4.4%

Unemployment in 2000 was 4.0%

It's not that everybody in the Eisenhower era who wanted to work hard was successful. It's that the conventional wisdom of the time was that everybody who was unsuccessful was a lazy bum.

[tXr]

70. "Everywhere around me I see jealousy and mayhem because no men have all their peace of mind to carry

them."