"Ahhh,...the good old days when..." "When I was a kid,..." You've all heard older people reminiscing about a time when things seemed so much simpler, we had a stronger sense of community, you knew most of your neighbors, etc. If you had a television, it had only 2-4 channels,...everyone sat around the TV and watched the same programs,...and the news was the truth, not opinion. The population was far more patriotic,...if there was a crisis, everyone stopped what they were doing and directed their attention towards it,...like a bees in a hive. In a hypothetical war, the 1942-era Americans would mobilize and kick the living crap out of 2022-era Americans before they could even react because the 2022 Americans would be too busy arguing with each other on how best to deal with the crisis. People, in general, were not afraid of everything,...that rose with the cable news networks, op-ed programs, and the internet. However, for some marginalized communities, especially those who were non-white, non-male,...it sucked. Racism and gender discrimination was on full display,...everywhere,...children, teachers, your boss, billboards, magazines, cartoons, comedy shows,...it was pervasive. Bullying,...at school, the workplace,...there was always somebody you knew who was a bully, and had to deal with them. Of course,...we didn't have as many guns, but we had no problem getting into a fist fight and taking care of business that way. People had their politics and religion, but we talked about these things in private,...they weren't out in the open.
The good old days in our minds is often a bit of selective context. There definitely were things that were tough to deal with in every generation. As best as I can describe it is that each generation, decade, era,...all had things that didn't make them "good". It was just different.