What happens when the ‘good old days’ weren’t all that good?

I was born in 1950 and came of age in the ’60s, as they say. I’ve heard all of the jokes about “if you remember the ’60s then you weren’t really there,” but I WAS there and I DO remember some things, and it wasn’t always the “good old days.”

Here are some photos from that time period (click to enlarge):

People who were around then will no doubt remember the typical American family that we saw portrayed on television: handsome, affluent working dad, prim and proper stay-at-home mom with pies in the oven, two perfect children with nice clothes and good grades who hung out weekends at the sock hop and weren’t on the corner selling crack cocaine.

There was probably even a big, fluffy, lovable dog named Patches or Scratches or Jiffy or Sniffy or Fido, Rover or Spot.

Was anything missing from those images? How about African American families, homosexuals, bi-racial couples, immigrants, Muslims in hijabs, Jews, Hindus, working women, single mothers, transgender men and women…?

No, you didn't see them in the 1950s or early 1960s.

According to The American Myth of the 1950s, “If you were not a white Christian male during this time period, you were most likely discriminated against.”

One of the images above shows African Americans standing in line front of a billboard proclaiming the “Great American Way.” I’m not sure what they were standing in line for in that photo, but it probably wasn’t tickets to a Broadway play.

When I was born there were four black players in Major League Baseball. West Virginia University didn’t enroll its first two African American football players until I was 13 years old in 1963. A lot of Americans voted against JFK for president in 1960 because he was a Catholic. No one talked about Hispanics, homosexuals or transgenders at all. It was as if they didn’t exist, which of course they did.

Most families had only one car back then because women didn’t work outside the home. Our house had a single-car garage, like every other house on our street. When I was born, women could not serve as jurors in federal court (not until 1957) or in courtrooms in 32 states. It wasn’t until 1973 – when I was 23 years old, married and a father – that women could serve on juries in all 50 states.

I could go on and on, but here’s the question: When we make America great again, which time period are we going back to, because if it’s the ‘50s or ‘60s, I’d just as soon pass.

To be clear, I don’t actually KNOW that Donald Trump wants to take us back to 1950. (Well, not exactly.) What I DO know is that he has nominated cabinet secretaries and key advisors who oppose the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, public education, the minimum wage, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, organized labor  and subsidized health care...and that’s just off the top of my head.

There’s no way these people are going to move this country forward when they oppose everything we’ve achieved so far in my lifetime. So to summarize, I don’t know exactly which point in the past we are headed for, but I know that any step backward is traveling in the wrong direction. If I start seeing drinking fountains labeled “WHITES ONLY” or commercials with women baking cookies, I’m going to get real concerned.

And don’t even get me started on gay marriage and restrooms for transgender children and adults. I’ve got another whole article about that. Stay tuned…