Where did you live specifically, Ed, and what period of time exactly are you talking about?
No offence, but when forming views of broad periods of history it’s much better to study a range of accounts and look at legislation, statistical data, etc. One person’s idealized memories of childhood isn’t a good way to form a view of what life was like for the average person. I can give you personal accounts from people living in countries in the Soviet bloc as children who have very positive recollections of their childhood and view it as a “better time”, but I still wouldn’t consider it a nice place to have lived.
As a young person I do not believe in the idealized past that nationalists and general right-wingers like to promote. Even if it was good for you, I would question how much your experience is that of most of the population.
Your dubiousness is exactly correct. It was actually a time of abject horror that I do not look back upon with any nostalgia. To depict that era in some sort of utopian term is offensive.
I grew up in the aftermath of World War II, which had further decimated the continent after the “War to end all wars”…men of that era, soldiers, invaded and decimated our countries and our families and our lives. They tore asunder national sovereignties and integrities. That is not civilised behaviour.
Civilised era? Go to Oświęcim and visit Auschwitz-Birkenau or go to Bergen-Belsen and then try to tell me about this “civilised era” in which everyone was safe.
Or go back and look at Reichskristallnacht and all the other pogroms and tell me about how everyone was civilised.
Those who had suffered the bombardments would hardly describe this time period as a civilised era.
Today, I have only to look around to be reminded of the absolute horror of that era; I can still see it wherever I look…because my parents made sure I would never forget…or allow people to tell lies about what that era was
really like.
From the '50s and the '60s, the children of Korea and French Indochina would not be speaking in such idyllic terms of what life was like – nor would the children in the countries of Africa, which were suffering under and freeing themselves from the oppression of colonial powers as they gained independence.
As for the United States…among my most vivid memories from decades ago was meeting African Americans who had been with the Reverend Martin Luther King in the tremendous and violent civil rights struggle to throw off decades of suffering and oppression. Hearing their account first hand. The words they used to describe that era were anything but the expressions I have thus far read in this thread. And, I could say the same thing regarding women Religious from the United States in that era with whom I worked. They also had much to say. May God bless them.
