Two out of five Americans think life was better for people like them 50 years ago, according to a recent survey.
This is the kind of result you get when a couple of generations pass without anyone getting drafted.
Fifty years ago was 1968. Vietnam popped immediately to my mind when that year was mentioned. So I did a little homework.
We lost 14,584 troops killed that year, averaging well over 1,000 a month. For comparison, we lost 499 in 2010 -- our bloodiest year to date in the War on Terror. That more recent figure obviously does not include the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks themselves. Civilian deaths in those attacks amounted to three months worth of our troop losses in Vietnam 50 years ago.
At least 30 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong died in 1968 for every one of us. Allied South Vietnamese died by the thousands per month also, as did hundreds of Vietnamese civilians.
The Pew Center's survey is available at pewglobal.org. Its results are drawn from more than 40,000 people polled who are scattered across 38 countries -- including Vietnam. Vietnam scored the highest of any country on the whether life is better now. It seems their memories of 1968 are more vivid.
Most of those American kids killed in Vietnam were drafted. So those troops were mainly 18 and 19 years old. They could not vote yet. The bill lowering the voting age from 21 was not passed until 1971.
The Pew Center's poll shows 41 percent of Americans think life was better for people like them 50 years ago. Only 37 percent of Americans polled in that survey think life is better for us now.
We have more information at our fingertips now than we had in any library I ever got to go into in 1968. The blindness needed to believe things are worse now than then can only be willful. The fact these survey figures came out during an economic boom is both notable and sobering.
Poll results worldwide show the hope of making more money is the biggest single factor people look for as far as well-being goes. The dim view people have of being able to get ahead in America anymore appears to be a heavy factor in the our pessimistic numbers.
Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. College students were still being killed in the civil rights movement and in the anti-war protests. Segregationist Justice Jim Johnson was the Democratic nominee for Arkansas governor. Richard M. Nixon was elected president.
Real problems are more difficult to ignore these days. Now everyone has a video recorder on a phone. Evidence of injustices are caught on camera much more than they used to be. This is a vast improvement. Apparently, that view of the matter is not universal.
Black male Americans, who made up 11 percent of the U.S. population back then, accounted for about 15 percent of the deaths in the Vietnam War.
The birth control pill had been invented in 1960, but it and other contraceptives were outlawed for the unmarried in some states until the U.S. Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Eisenstadt vs. Baird. That law overturned an anti-contraceptive ban in Massachusetts.
There was no such thing as a no-fault divorce. California became the first state to pass such a law in 1969.
Homosexuality was still listed as a mental disease by the American Psychiatric Association.
Global warming was well underway. Knowledge of it was just not widespread.
Now I have to admit that gasoline prices were cheaper back then, and that does seem to be a very accurate indicator of the national mood. Adjusted for inflation, gas cost an average of about $1.80 a gallon in those days. Still, it's cheaper to operate a vehicle now. The average car got 12 miles a gallon back then. No one in my family drives a car that does not get at least twice that.
Cars have airbags now.
A 1968 microwave oven cost $4,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars and would burn up if left on while empty.
I am not trying to be flippant about the problems we have today. In civil rights and race relations in particular, not nearly enough progress has been made over the last 50 years. The fact remains, however, that the idea life was better 50 years ago in the United States is absurd.
Commentary on 07/07/2018