Here's a quote put up over at FRK:

[conuly]

Come on, the world is a way scarier place than it was when we were kids.

In the ’20s, moms let kids play in the street while they cleaned. In the ’60s, kids went out in the morning and bounced around all day playing Ringolevio.

These days, kids get snatched off the street and people try to bomb Times Square and the Herald Square subway station.

I said something about it there, but I'll say it again here:

Back in the 20s? There were pedophile scares then. It's not like child molesters suddenly appeared 20 years ago.

Back in the 20s? If your kid got a cut on the street and it got infected? There was no penicillin! Your kid might lose that limb, or even die. I hate those commercials for Neosporin which show people putting antibiotics willy-nilly on every little scrape and cut, but when there weren't any at all, that was no joke! Why do you think people started overusing antibiotics in the first place? They were thrilled people wouldn't die of these diseases anymore!

Back in the 20s we'd just finished the War to End All Wars, which was rapidly followed up by The Great Flu Epidemic - that's the same epidemic people are *still* scared of. Very few people alive nowadays know anybody who died back then, and we laugh about flu vaccines, but there's a real reason governments and scientists are working overtime to keep this from showing up ever again. (Not sure the resulting hype is a good thing, no, but I know why it's there.) We were starting to get those polio scares - my mother remembers those.

I don't know if anybody really felt particularly safe. They just lived.

There were bombings in the 20s, too. I remember reading about one in Manhattan, some Italian socialists bombed something, I think a bank, with - of all things! - a car bomb! (Or a horse-drawn carriage bomb, actually.)

In the 60s? Well, in the 60s you didn't let your kids go to Times Square, first off.

But in the 60s we were living under the threat of the Cold War. We had just finished the Second World War, with the Holocaust and all. There was a constant threat of nuclear bombs at any minute. There were riots.

The 70s and 80s, when most of these people making these comments grew up, were actually scary. (This is probably why they're so freaky paranoid now - when they grew up in a dangerous, scary world, they're inclined to think that it's kept on getting scary. Silly, but there it is.) There was that new scary disease, AIDS. There was still that threat of nuclear war. There were serial killers - my mother claims to have actually met Son of Sam, but declined to go home with him. (Good thing, too!) There were bombings in subways, yes, really. There was terrorism. There was a genuinely high crime rate. There was that Satanic Ritual Abuse scare, which is STILL terrifying people on two fronts - either they're scared it'll happen to their kids (I know, it never really happened) or they're scared they'll be accused of doing it to somebody's kids.

We're now at a 30 year LOW in crime. This is all over the nation, not just New York. (And some of these crimes have always been rare. Abduction and rape by a stranger? Never common - most rapes, of children and otherwise, are by people you know. Bombings? Never common, thankfully.)

What's really funny is people want to live in some idyllic time in the past when "things were better", but they're so caught up in what actually was going on in the past, in their own childhood, that they can't see that things are better now. They're scared of the crimes and problems that happened *then*, even as they say the world is scarier *now*. It's not scarier now! THEN it was scary. Now... not so much.

But they're living in the past, and they WANT to live in the past they've made as well. Convincing them to live in the present (and to want to) is close to impossible.

Comments

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

I can't think of anything good to say other than

Word.

[conuly]

They started their decline in 1993.

[redbird]

Yes. I was arguing a few months back with one of the anti-vaccination people who has doubts about antibiotics as well, and who offered what she thought was a clinching argument: if things were so dangerous back then, how did people survive? So I explained: most of them didn't. My great-grandmother gave birth to 13 children. My grandmother was the last of those: when she was born, she had 3 older siblings alive. That's less than 1/3 making it to adulthood. (Disease and poverty, a particularly bad combination: but it's far too easy for middle-class people today to assume that their ancestors 100 or 200 years ago always had enough to eat.)

Another piece of this is that we're talking more about certain things: it's easy to think the rate of rapes has gone up, now that it's not always unthinkable for someone to say that she was raped by her husband, or boyfriend; or that they (either sex) were raped by a parent or uncle or family friend or clergymember. But those crimes aren't new.

[ancarett]

I have family members and older acquaintances who remember having to leave the city for all of August to avoid the polio epidemics. The streets were empty and schools started late to try and keep as many children alive as possible.

My father-in-law never graduated from high school because, after his dad dropped dead of a heart attack, he had to join his other sibling in bringing in some money (while his mom also went back to work). My mother lost her own dad at 14 and only got to go to university through a scholarship. They certainly never described childhoods full of youthful freedom, either!

These people aren't living in the past, as you note. They're living in an idealized and unreal construction of the past which is ultimately hurtful to our society because they feel they can impose this nostalgic vision upon the present if we just change X, Y and Z without realizing how idiotic the entire scheme is!

[conuly]

Well, they are living in THE past. They're living in the 70s through the early 90s. They're trying to live in the magical unreal past.

So they're trying to put their nostalgic ideas and... ugh.

[erisiansaint]

I know some of my own worries stem from Adam Walsh. (Remember him?)

The thing is, I lived in S. Florida at the time. And the day before he got kidnapped, I was at that particular sears, the one in the Hollywood Mall with my grandma, and I'd been pestering her to let me go to the toy section by myself. She wouldn't let me. He was only 2 years younger than me. I was afraid to leave an adult's side in a store for YEARS.

You're not wrong. These things happened in the 20s. The difference is in media saturation.

[conuly]

I know some of my own worries stem from Adam Walsh. (Remember him?)

No, actually. I wasn't even born when he died.

(Adam Walsh is a particular thorn in my side. EVERY TIME people talk about Stranger Danger they bring him up. I want them to pick somebody new, already!)

[erisiansaint]

It was a /huge/ deal, at the time. It was the first one that was publicized so widely, and he really was found dead in a ditch. Well, parts of him.

[conuly]

I can imagine it was huge, from the attention the case still receives. But I wasn't alive yet, so I don't know, you know, personally.

[rhicat.livejournal.com]

Staten Island had their own version in the 80s. Holly Iforgetherlastname. My fuzzy memory seems to think the guy who abducted/killed her was a homeless guy living in the tunnels underneath Willowbrook (CSI today.)

But yeah, agree x 1000.

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

The 70s and 80s, when most of these people making these comments grew up, were actually scary.

Don't forget the Tylenol tampering, and the razorblades in Halloween candy thing. =P What an idyllic age I grew up in!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

There weren't ever actually any razorblades or poison found in Halloween treats given to children, though they did bust one kid for putting razorblades in his own apple to scare his family, and one father poisoned his own child, trying to make it look like she'd been poisoned by treats.

[conuly]

Actually, I believe there *have* been a few odd incidents of items being found in treats... all of which were easily seen and identified before they could be haplessly swallowed.

But poison, no.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"The world" is a mighty big place. The USA alone is huge, and conditions in neighborhoods across the country have always varied widely.

When my parents were growing up in post-Depression small-town Nebraska, children didn't just roam free in packs like feral chimpanzees all the time, because when they weren't in school or church, they had chores, lessons and jobs to do. Everybody in the whole county knew everybody else, but child abuse was not talked about back then: sex was a Forbidden Subject, and adults were pretty-much allowed to do whatever they wanted to children in their care. So whatever abuse occurred, it probably occurred indoors, not 'on the street'. Of course there were tramps and hobos around, some of whom might have been dangerous if they got the opportunity.

By the time I was born, at the end of the Baby Boom, the 'Youth Culture' in this country was already well-entrenched; many children had no more chores than cleaning their own rooms, if they even did that much. As a child in semi-rural California in the early 60's, I played freely in the orchards and biked all around the neighborhood, having been warned (but not very emphatically) to beware of 'sick' strangers if any tried to lure me.

As a pre-adolescent in the well-to-do New Jersey suburbs in the late 60's, I was part of the full-on Child-Pack phenomenon in its fullest flower. It's true, childhood will probably never be that way again - we had a shocking degree of license and encouragement to waste our time, effort and (most importantly) money on toys and games, treats and shinies, fashion and pop entertainment, and we weren't asked or expected to contribute anything to our households.

On the other hand, we weren't valued. Almost no Mommies had jobs, and school in those days was a solid M-F 9AM-3PM deal except for the standard holidays, so they were free to do their own thing till we got home, but then they had to bust ass to make dinner and all before Dad got home from work. So? Throw the rug-rats outside! It wasn't so much that we were 'let' to run off on our own devices; it was that children were customarily treated more like expensive pets than like bona fide people, and summarily excluded from most of adult life.

I turned 12 in 1970, just in time for the Era of Sexual Harassment, where a chick could expect to be hit on by any straight man under 35 whose lady-friend wasn't actually physically present and holding his arm. The woods were not safe. The streets were not safe. The stores and trains and buses and movie theatres were not safe. Oh yeah, the glorious days of the Sexual Revolution: "release the horndogs!!!" But reportedly, the urban/suburban East Coast culture has always been quite predatory toward young women, so it was a difference of degree, not of kind.

I finished college in '79, in Columbus, OH. The kids I saw and taught seemed to have plenty of liberty to play outside unwatched, and to get around town on their own by bike and bus; the schools in which I taught didn't lay undue stress on the whole stranger-danger thing. Again, young women were probably at far more at risk than children.

I had my daughter in '89, here in western Washington, and she grew up as free-range a child as I could make possible for her. Tell you what, the wilderness is a hundred times safer than any city just for lack of cars, and there's nothing on the entire Olympic Peninsula that any sensible terrorist would think worth bombing. My grand-babies are gonna grow up free-range in the forest too - time enough to see Times Square when they're old enough to order champagne. :)

Antiseptics of the previous millennia

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"Back in the 20s? If your kid got a cut on the street and it got infected? There was no penicillin! Your kid might lose that limb, or even die. I hate those commercials for Neosporin which show people putting antibiotics willy-nilly on every little scrape and cut, but when there weren't any at all, that was no joke!"

Not. Hello; back in the 20's they put Mercurochrome willy-nilly on every little scrape and cut. My mother didn't, though; she used tincture of iodine (http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Use-of-Iodine-in-Wound-Care&id=1952371), which stung like fire but worked as advertised:

"Given the growing concern over the rise of antibiotic-resistant organisms, cadexomer iodine is an effective alternative for the treatment of chronic wounds. Reports of resistance to iodine are scarce, despite the fact that iodine has been in use for over 150 years. Cadexomer iodine can be safely used on most patients (providing they are not sensitive to iodine itself) and provides good coverage of bacteria, mycobacterium, fungi, and protozoa, as well as being effective against MRSA."

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, probably long before, it's been known that when infection sets in, the way to cure it is to boil up a pot of water with a handful of salt, sop in a folded rag, and slap it on the wound, hot enough to almost burn but not quite. Some thyme in the water after it's boiled also helps, but it's mostly just the heat and salt that pulls the infection out. Janet Swisshelm (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAswisshelm.htm), a Civil War nurse, writes of routinely curing advanced cases of pyemia with nothing but hot compresses.

Re: Antiseptics of the previous millennia

[conuly]

Wait, that stuff works?

Re: Antiseptics of the previous millennia

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Yes it does; tincture of iodine will even stop erysipelas. It is THE stuff to carry in the woods, to immediately put on tick bites or spider bites, because it will kill off Lyme disease and MRSA bacteria on contact. And since it's not an antibiotic, the wee bastards can't evolve to resist it.

Mercurochrome contains mercury, which is why you can't get it in this country any more, and why it's probably not the best choice for anyone who might be hypersensitive to mercury for any reason, but it does work just fine to disinfect a wound. Time was, mercurochrome and and iodine were as ubiquitous in everybody's first-aid kit, as antibiotic ointment is now.

The big problem they had in the Civil War hospitals was that although they did (sort of) grok the germ theory of disease, they had no concept of antiseptic surgery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiseptic#Usage_in_surgery) yet. The hospitals and surgeries were horrifyingly pathogenic, over-crowded with the terribly sick and wounded, under-staffed and under-supplied. They did have carbolic acid and bromine for disinfectants, but not large supplies of them, and those are harshly caustic on flesh. They also used apple cider vinegar (http://www.apple-cider-vinegar-benefits.com/vinegar-as-a-disinfectant.html), which [Bad username or site: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/vinegar-kills-bacteria-mold-germs.html @ livejournal.com]kills germs as well as those new-fangled store-bought sprays.

The problem was 'too little, too late' - they had to triage; the doctors left alone the soldiers who'd probably die anyway, and those who'd probably get better anyway, and focused on saving the lives they could save, mostly by amputating gangrenous limbs. If those who should've gotten better on their own got worse instead, a minor infection could blossom into a lethal one in mere hours. That's why Janet Swisshelm writes that she considers 'piemia' (bacterial infection) to be just another name for 'neglect'.

The nurses of the Civil War made an incredible contribution to the practice of medicine. Due to the nature of that war, all the bits of healing-lore that all the womenfolk had got swapped around and shared, from the classical literary and scientific knowledge of the refined ladies to the herb-lore and bare-bones techniques of the witch-wives and conjure-women, because practically every adult female East of Kansas was nursing someone deathly ill and/or grieviously wounded, and all networking together to pass along any tips that might help.

It was the nurses who figured out the importance of cleanliness, warmth, fresh air, good food and emotional support in saving lives: clear evidence that it isn't all about the germs; it's also about the immune system. :)

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

Going back from the '20s:

Unionists.
Anarchists.
White slavers.
Gypsies.
Escaped slaves.
Jews.
Highwaymen.
Wild animals.
Faeries.
Witches.
Local legendary creatures.
"Evil spirits" (generic).

Basically, we have always feared the generic Evil Spirit, but we put "rational" faces on it here and there, depending on what constitutes rationality. This is so we can recognize and defend against it, without admitting that a) evil wears any face it pleases, and b) all the exacting instructions we give our children (and follow ourselves) sometimes amount to nothing more effective than wearing a cross and stringing garlic around the windows.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Wearing a holy symbol (any brand) and stringing garlic around the windows is 100% effective at keeping all supernatural beings from messing with you in any way.

Of course it doesn't do a bit of good against natural beings, like spiders or raccoons or one's relatives - they'll all waltz right in like garlic had never been invented, to alarm, annoy, and quite possibly bite you if you don't take other kinds of precautions against them. But even a single pinch of salt at the threshhold is enough to permanently deter and drive off every non-biological creature in the whole Monster Manual.

In fact, if ya know whatcher doin', ya don't even need the salt. :)

[jedirita.livejournal.com]

I can't believe you forgot to mention the Lindburgh baby kidnapping! That was in the 20s too.

[conuly]

Oh god, yes.