13/09/2023
Written by Janis Ian;
I posted this in response to someone on another thread whose son felt that our generation had not done enough and had really screwed up the world. I think it's too easy to forget what the world and this country were like before our generation. Every time someone says "okay boomer", quite frankly I want to slap them upside the head and pop them back to 1958 and see how well they deal with it.
Your son may not realize the incredible strides we DID make. If we made any mistake it was in underestimating the lengths to which the powers that be would go in order to maintain their power. However, before our generation, blacks could not legally vote in many states, schools didn't have to be integrated, gay people had no rights, let alone the right to marry, you could not demand to see your medical records or remove them from a doctor's office in order to take them somewhere else...
women could not have bank accounts in their own name and loans that women took out had to be signed by their husbands, women could not have credit cards without a co-signature from their husbands or buy a house or a car without a man's signature, r**e by a husband was considered normal or at least, not actionable, people could be put into asylums for something like ma********ng in their bedrooms if their parents objected...
pregnant young women were not permitted in public in many places and had to leave their jobs as soon as the company found out they were pregnant, women couldn't wear pants to work or restaurants or school (at my school the temperature had to be below 20 and we had to change into dresses or skirts for class), there were no integrated ads on television and no integrated television shows, gay people were considered mentally ill and could be lobotomized on the signature of two doctors, as could people who were mentally deficient or thought to be so...
people who were schizophrenic or otherwise mentally ill were considered bad people and usually shut away, people with cerebral palsy and other neurological issues that made it difficult for them to communicate were not permitted to attend regular school let alone college, there was no Disabilities Act and businesses did not have to accommodate anyone disabled, there were no disabled people on television or in the movies unless it was part of a script and they either recovered or committed su***de...
it was assumed that all gay people were licentious and could never have an enduring relationship, there was little or no awareness of ecology and the issues humans were creating ecologically, puppy mills were routine and no one thought anything of it if you dumped an animal by the side of the road when you were done with it, there were no laws against animal abuse, laws against child abuse were barely extant and rarely enforced...
teachers in many states could paddle children until they raised welts, often forcing them to take down their pants or hike their dresses in front of the entire class so theyir bare bottoms showed, priests were routinely hidden if they were child molesters with zero consequences, abortion was illegal in almost every state, the life of the mother was routinely assumed to be less important than that of an unborn or newborn child...
you were not allowed to switch doctors without the doctor saying it was all right or without them retiring, and even then you usually have to be passed on to whatever doctor they wanted you to see, there were no women on the Supreme court, women were not permitted to attend many colleges, it was legal for clubs to discriminate against people based on their religion, their race, their gender, their color...
almost all December holiday celebrations in schools and cities and towns were Christian, Jews were not permitted to attend many educational institutions, and hundreds of other things that your son and his generation now take for granted....
Girls couldn't play in most sports, including Little League, or have paper routes. Boys were subject to the draft, which was mandatory . When the birth control pill came out, your husband or father had to approve before you could get it. If you were married, you couldn'tget a vasectomywithoutyour wife's signature. If female, doctors wouldn't perform hysterectomies if you were still even remotely of child bearing age unless your life was at risk, and even then...
Seatbelts, airbags and crash bumpers were not required. There was no unleaded gas, no
MPG requirements, no emission controls. No Environmental Protection Agency. Birth control was actually illegal in many states, including now-progressive states like Massachusetts, children with disabilities (even something like corrective leg braces) were often not allowed to attend public school, and indigent defendants had no right to a public defender in most states.
Domestic violence was so common that the phrase didn’t even exist, and there were no shelters or hotlines for that, or for r**e. There was no recourse if you were sexually harassed on the job, either. We forced the creation of OSHA for workplace safety, forced the legalization of in*******al marriage, stopped legal dumping of chemicals into public water sources by factories and nuclear facilities, created Earth Day (I know that because I wrote and sang the first song promoting it), stopped airplanes and trains from dumping waste into the air and onto the tracks, made birth control available to unmarried women, saved the bald eagles, and a host of other rights and privileges that we now take for granted.
Most important, in a sharply divided country (remember the 50's?!), we came together! We were activists and we found our strength in numbers, at the polls, in the courts, on the streets.
So perhaps a bit of perspective is in order. I'm sorry your son blames our generation but realistically, if his generation do half of the good we did, we will have a much better world
