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Would you go back, if you could?


Aeriel

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All decades have problems. This decade we are in right now s-cks, since there is a war and gas is $135,210,256.00 per gallon (well, if not now, it will be tomorrow) and jobs are going to India, and on and on...

But would you rather be in the "Dust Bowl" of the 1930's?

How about going back to the year 1066, and be in one of those villages that

William the Conqueror burned down?

Wanna go back to the 1940's, and live in Poland... and be Jewish?

Or live in the 1850's, in the south, and be black?

How about living in Salem, in the 1600's, and being a woman?

Is there any perfect time or place to be in? NOPE!

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Although I am very grateful for the advances we have made in human rights (especially women's rights, since I am a woman), in one way I would like to go back to somewhere in the early 60s through mid-70s. I remember a woman who was newly married in the early 60s, saying that one thing she and her new husband knew without a doubt: however little they might have at the moment, things could only get better. How many people today can say the same? I also remember someone saying that in the 1970s, if someone was still at the office after 5 p.m., their co-workers would simply assume that they weren't efficient enough to get all their work done within working hours. Think of all the job stress we accept as "normal" today! Also, remember a time when a pension was considered a normal perk of working for a particular company?

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That IS definitely one thing that has changed, some say for better and some say for worse but when people married and moved to their new home, they were starting out. Shower gifts were tea towels and wooden spoons, wedding gifts were pots and pans and MAYBE a toaster. Nowadays, they've been living together for 5 years - or combining two households, their biggest dilemma is how are they going to fit TWO plasma televisions in one house and they have to buy 3 more TVs to accommodate the kids, too.

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All decades have problems. This decade we are in right now s-cks, since there is a war and gas is $135,210,256.00 per gallon (well, if not now, it will be tomorrow) and jobs are going to India, and on and on...

But would you rather be in the "Dust Bowl" of the 1930's?

How about going back to the year 1066, and be in one of those villages that

William the Conqueror burned down?

Wanna go back to the 1940's, and live in Poland... and be Jewish?

Or live in the 1850's, in the south, and be black?

How about living in Salem, in the 1600's, and being a woman?

Is there any perfect time or place to be in? NOPE!

Ah but the question was when would YOU prefer to live..not whether there was a "perfect decade".

Just a minor correction though..William I was not known for burning down villages. As far as the average inhabitant of these islands was concerned his take-over meant little more than the fact that the boss spoke in a french dialect rather than anglo-saxon.

In every decade there are people who have found their "time" just as there are those who wish they hadn't. If that were not so then the world wouldn't change. It is a question of WHAT has changed and how it affects/affected you as an individual that makes the question interesting.

There are a lot of things that happened to me in the 50's/60's that I would have changed (but couldn't) but that relates more to individual circumstances and personalities rather than to the overall environment..and equally there are a lot of things in todays world that I am very happy with again relating to personal circumstances and personalities rather than environment. Overall though if somehow the world's development had "frozen" in the late 50's I strongly suspect that I would be just as happy as I am now and conceivably a lot happier. This isn't nostalgia (though naturally that plays a part) but more a measure of a personal balance sheet.

roddy

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Kia ora- this person was born in 1947:

-the 50s had their pluses (kids could roam freely, get up to kiddy crime & petty vandalism and were sort of expected to: there were established rules and mores that older people were expected to adhere to (in my 3 cultures/ethnicities.) ANZ was a proud welfare state - with quite a few people missing out (single mothers, Maori, mentally handicapped.))

-the minuses were many (Maori were admired as stereotypes, not as real present-day people; social pressure to conform to 'the norm' was immense, and The Arts struggled to make any kind of impact on a philistine culture which summed itself up as 'rugby, racing, and beer - downunder, they're mad over their' etc.)

I *would not* live back in the 1950s.

-60s had their moments of appeal: the welfare state extended a bit; inequities started being noticed (o, Maori footballers could only play as 'honorary whites' in South Africa?) and the music scene got waaay better.

Towards the end of the decade, the nation began to tiptoe into a world of change.

While I fould the 1960s interesting - I was an adolescent for much of 'em afterall - I *would not* live back in the 1960s.

And I could go through the '70s, '80s, 90s like this - each decade making this wonderful land a little more complex - and fraught- and the world itself so-

I would not go back to any previous decade at all.

Now is - an interesting time...

I love some of the technology, and have hope, and some optimism, as reguards science.And in the fact that there are more, many millions more, educated people... It is not a *comfortable* time to be alive (but then, as others have pointed out, when was?) and humanity may not survive too many more decades, but I would *not* regress to any time past-

'distance makes the heart grow fonder.'

And memory obscures the bad, enhances the comfortable-

(But if anyone invents a reliable timemachine please let me know! I would love to hear the dawn chorus here, a thousand years ago, or see giant penguins strutting ashore at beaches I love-)

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UnicornLady

I was probably at my happiest as a student in the mid-1980s. If I were 40 then, I'd probably have been in work. But my employment prospects and the social fabric of the country were wrecked in that decade by Thatcherism.

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I can't think of any particular time that would have been better, so I guess I'm as happy to be here now as I would be anyplace else.

I just wish I could make my body younger without sacrificing everything I have learned and experienced in getting to this point!

Nothing new about THAT idea, though! :lol:

-GB

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I can't think of any particular time that would have been better, so I guess I'm as happy to be here now as I would be anyplace else.

I just wish I could make my body younger without sacrificing everything I have learned and experienced in getting to this point!

Nothing new about THAT idea, though! :lol:

-GB

If we could just live long enough to get a couple of those robot bodies that are "just around the corner" . . . Then again, technology ages even faster than flesh and bone, doesn't it? Forget the robot bodies. I wouldn't want to require an upgrade every six months. . . . I have enough problems getting my insurace to cover whatever maintenance I require now. . . . :roll:

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  • 2 weeks later...

No.

I prefer to jump ahead 20 years in my mind, now. And apply to the present what I see coming then. The past is dead, the future is ours.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm with Steel. As a casual student of History, I'm very aware of the insane awfulness people had to put up with in the past. There is no "golden age", unless it lies somewhere ahead of us. I'm grateful for the internet, for medical advances, for social tolerance (the past six years being one giant step backwards unfortunately), and for computer imaging that allowed the Lord of the Rings movies to be so amazingly cool.

-Chiaroscuro

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  • 3 weeks later...

I agree that each decade has plusses and minuses but I have grown children and I really wish I had been raising them when we had the Internet. Whenever my daughter has the slightest interest in something related to her baby she can get on the Net and find out a huge amount about the subject in a few minutes and connect with people who have devoted their whole lives to the subject. Like circumcision or nursing an adopted baby. What a resource!

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Chiaroscuro Wrote:

and for computer imaging that allowed the Lord of the Rings movies to be so amazingly cool.

Oh yes!

I read "The Hobbit" as a teen in the 60's. Then read "The Lord of the Rings" Trilogy. Then for the rest of my life, waited until they could become a movie. We finally got "The Lord of the Rings" Movies. Now if we can get "The Hobbit" made into an equally if not even better movie then my life will be complete. :lol: :lol: :lol:

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