That's the problem nowadays. I'm 50 years old. My generation remember the freedoms we had to make our own choices in how we wanted to live as long as we weren't hurting anyone else. Nowadays, they just keep banning so many stupid things that the younger generation think it's normal and okay to do it. No one seems to ever say anything. They get a few sour pots on a city commission that think they are God and can decide whatever they want. I've been thinking of starting a facebook page about stupid bans so we can all just sit around and ridicule these crazies.
Wow, this is so very much the opposite to how my mother (born in 1944) described the 50s and early 60s. According to her, government didn't need to do the restricting because society did it for you. If you stepped off the accepted path, the wrath of friends, family, teachers, and employers alike was upon you. Doing "the wrong thing" in society's eyes could easily get you unofficially blacklisted from local establishments and could even get you run out of town. At the very least you might have the living cr*p kicked out of you in the dead of night to "teach you a good lesson." A little smack or two from a husband was generally met (from your own mother, among others) with, "Well, why don't you try harder?" Same with a bruise or a hand-mark from your parents (or teachers -- or your friend's mother, or a stranger in the store). Society told you how to act and if you chose not to do those things, well, you took your lumps.
Children were hit in schools for not performing per the exact curriculum. If they told their parents they got a spanking at school, they got another beating at home for having gotten in trouble at school. Boys definitely had the right to defend themselves against bullies -- and God help them if they were the smaller of the fight because they also had no recourse if they were the loser (again and again). You dressed a certain way and you wore your hair a certain way or your teachers humiliated you in class and you were even sent home until you straightened up and flew the very narrow, non-choice-ridden course. I have a relative whose teacher sliced some of his hair off with scissors because he was looking scraggly. He was told to come back after he had a decent (status quo) haircut.
An employer could easily fire you because he didn't like the way you wore your hair or the way you dressed or he didn't like your outside-the-box thoughts or basically for any reason at all -- and he'd outright say so before kicking you to the curb. Likewise if you were a woman who didn't like her boss rubbing her .... every time she passed by. Too bad, so sad for you. Those crazy libs everybody seems to love so much to hate weren't there yet to ensure that you could dress, act and speak as you like and that you were protected in doing so. And Big Gubbmint wasn't there to "interfere" with your right, to, um...do exactly as you were told. (Uh...) Ah, the good old days!
If, as a boy or a man, you didn't have exactly the correct "boy" hobbies, you were a sissy and a freak and you'd be kicked around daily in school. As a girl, you sat silently with your legs crossed at the ankles and played with your dolls or you were mercilessly attacked by grown-ups for being unladylike. Men and women worked their correct roles...and that was IT.
Doctors gave you their verdict without your input, and if you refused to take exactly what medication they prescribed, they'd refuse to treat you, buh-bye, and if that was the only doctor in town, well good luck to you. Wearing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, etc. meant a loss of friends and often family. Not marrying at the right time of life meant you were a pariah. And being anything but an at-least-middle-class white male meant you had very, very few choices.
I hear all about these "golden years" when "nobody told us what to do" and I think of my mom's memories (and my father's, aunts and uncles, etc. -- and stories from blacks, from women, from Asians, from the poor, from immigrants and basically from anyone not white, male and 35 years old) and I just have to shake my head. Sorry. "The good old days of freedoms," my .....
From what I hear, though, the sock hops were fun.
