Woke anti-racist propaganda from the 1950s. It was dystopian too 😭

I can see this meme got you all upset.

I’m also angry at the loss of asbestos. Great useful mineral, woke Leftists bankrupted a lot of companies

What a pathetic performance of feigned rebuttal. Don't throw your dummy out the pram because I called out your disgusting Weimar-level society, ya big baby.

One does not simply endorse 1950s-era society without noting some of its obvious downsides. Shall I go on?

Ehh no. Why should it? If for arguments sake I say I like the way men in the 50's put much more social pressure on other men to be more chivalrous generally and enforced culturally masculinity in that those men strive to provide for and protect their own - does that also mean I support how men in the 50's would also mistreat women and look down on them for arbitrary reasons? The answer is simply no.

I can buy a 1950's car without having to disobey seatbelts laws accurate to the time when the car was manufactured.

I can put on a 1950's Soviet infantryman's uniform (Which I often do) without acting like a communist of the time.

You can pick elements and traits from something and use that as a good example without having to bring along all the accompanying traits.

What did the 50's have that I uphold as moral virtue of today? It's not the rampant and encouraged degeneracy, decadence and nihilism that plagues todays world that was in much less supply in the past.

You believe in absolute democracy, shall we bury women alive that the whole town votes for just like the ancient Greeks did since democracy is an Athenian invention and by your logic we must bring attention to this unimportant detail? Of course not, because we don't copy the wrongs of the past but we do copy what works and strive for what's morally good and proven so by our study of the past (The tried and true as they say). Otherwise humans would not evolve, would we.

Make sense?

Of course. There were admirable aspects of 1950s society. But any discussion about pre-Civil Rights era America should clear about what exactly we’re deeming worth saving from the past.

The 1950s is remembered fondly by conservatives as the era of suburban expansion, the two-car garage, higher religiosity/patriotism, prescribed gender roles, and the single-income family, and is fondly remembered by liberals as an era of strong labor protections, educational spending (the G.I. Bill), infrastructure projects (the federal highway system), and high taxation (top tax rates at the time would make post-Reagan Republicans blush).

You could also add it was an era of social consensus, as partisanship was not as rigid, this was long before social media and its toxicity, and the vast majority of people got their news about the world from the same 3 sources because that’s all there was.

My own impression of the 1950s is that while it may have contained all those positive aspects (especially for white people), it was also an era of stultifying conformity which papered over substantial anxiety.

The next thing I was going to say in criticism of the 1950s was the way it foisted upon children the existential angst of nuclear annihilation with meaningless tips like “duck and cover.”

To be sure, America’s “duck and cover” campaign was perhaps a healthier and more adaptive response to the nuclear age than Mao Ze Dong’s idea that “China has lots of people, we need not fear any nuclear war,” but nevertheless.

Though we still have nuclear weapons, we no longer teach children to duck-and-cover. Why not? Perhaps we realized whatever safety benefits that may have conferred weren’t worth the downsides of teaching every child in America that they could be vaporized in an instant.

But fast-forward to the 2020’s, and at least in America, we’re regularly drilling children what to do in the event of a mass shooter, rather than solving the problem of mass shootings.

Which era’s more dystopian? There’s a case they both are. And there’s another case they both aren’t.