Remembering the 70's...

I've always found it peculiar that many of the baby boomers, for whatever reason, turned to religious fundamentalism and conservative politics as a perceived solution to their problems. In a way, they short-circuited the ideals that they held in their younger years and have caused the social atmosphere to become increasingly reactionary. I used to think the 80s were bad until I saw what happened post 911.

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This thread is about remembering the 70's which for me as a small child was but a fleeting memory (this thread is not about 'can you top this')

While I'd be a fool to compare our weather to the summit of donner pass, this storm will go down in the annals of modern history for the 54 lives that it took, the over 100 mph winds, and the massive destruction of over 2000 homes along the New England coast (in addition to the impressive snow total of 52 inches in NW Rhode Island)



Hotwater

 

There was another blizzard of the century around the middle of march in 1993 that dumped snow in Alabama and many other places east of the Mississippi. Probably a bigger storm in terms of geographic area than the one in 1978.

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Here's a satellite image from a NOAA satellite of the aftermath of the blizzard of 1993. The milky white is all snow, as far south as Alabama. The feathery clouds on the lower right are due to extremely cold air over the ocean. Ice is seen on the south shore of Lake Erie. A snowy outline of the Appalacian Mountains is seen.



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The storm in 1993 was somewhat of a disappointment with only 20 inches of snow locally, especially when we were hearing reports further south in places like Philly and New York of snowfall rates in excess of 4 inches an hour.

We were bracing for another Blizzard of '78' but only got her little cousin

Hotwater

 

well 68 was ALMOST the 70s. culturaly, experientialy, the decade could be said to have begun with woodstock and ended with carter getting screwed by the conspiracy between raygun and khomani. although i think of the era most people today, especialy those who weren't at least teen agers then, think of as the 70s could be said to/thought of as having, begun sometime between the nomination and death by gunshot, of jfk. or even slightly earlier, with the end, or at least winding down, of red scare mccarthyism.

disco and platform shoes, incidently, were early 80s, not 70s at all either.

and it wasn't about getting high either, although free rock concerts in the park and on college campuses were certainly a cool and mellow part of it. as were hitching, picking up hitchers, crashing with straingers, letting strangers crash in your pad, and so on, all of that. 'erb, acid and shrooms were part of that scene, or came with it perhapse, but were never intrinsic to it. though dr tim had a certain fan fallowing.

but being mellow and creative and letting each other be mellow and creative, THAT was the whole point, that and opposing war and injustice.

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I think a demarcation could be drawn at the point where people were too young to be drafted. They were the post-vietnam era, people born in the late 50s or thereabouts.

Early 70s was still turbulent. The rest was more mellow, more so after the vietnam thing was over. I tend to see the 70s as a response to the turmoil of earlier years. It's as if people wanted to take some shelter in an artificial world of things like drugs and disco. There was a 'return to the land' sort of movement going on. Some of what was left of the hippie movement took up an agrarian lifestyle. The rest melded back into mainstream society.

Disco as a drug cult was pretty much over when the feds raided studio 54 around 1980 and after that anti-disco riot at Comiskey Park around 1979. They reopened later but not with the intensity of earlier years. The disco thing was revived with the help of Michael Jackson and others in the early to mid-80s in a re-packaged form, although the recording industry was clever enough to not refer to it as disco. 'Thriller' sounds very similar to a Bee Gees disco record. It sold tens of millions in spite of people claiming they hated disco.

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The atmosphere today politically is far different. It's almost bizarre that in the 70s there was a proposed amendment to guarantee people's rights and now we have a call for a Constitutional amendment to limit people's rights. It's a sign of the times.

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disco and platform shoes were mid 70's. the early 80's were the pointy bow-toed / pumps and ankle boots. duran duran, human league new wave type stuff

 

The Inpeachment of President Nixon was huge.


President Ford negotiated the Helsinki acords with Brezhnev from The Soviet Union. we thought that dentent was under way.

The first gas crisis was 1974 a second in 1979 with gas lines, alternate days fill ups. People got interested in Toyota and Honda.

The Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979 by Aytolah Kohemini and the Iranian Revolution. It brought lots of displaced Iranians to The US.
Saddam Husein then attacked Iran they were at war for 8 years.

There was a civil war in Lebanon in 1975 we received immigrants from Lebanon.

There was the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Camp David Accords.

Earth Day was born in 1970. Roe vs w Wade was in 1973.

The Bi-Centenial of 1976 was a huge party. Tall ships in NY harbor.

a pack of smokes was $0.50 a candy bar a nickel. a subway ride a quarter.

 

nixon wasn't impeached, he resigned, thus avoiding any true test of whether the mechanism for impeachment could actualy work when it was needed to or not. we DID finnaly get our oil greedy and idiologicly fanatical assess out of viet nam though!

the bi-centenial was a load of crap and was the beggining of the screwing up of most of what we had fought for in the 60s and gained in the 70s.

i still thing the khomani thing had the collusion of the raygun administration and his then fledgling cia lackey, donald rumsfield.

candy bars were a dime from the 40s through the 60s and into the 70s
then it started jumping up like crazy every since. the last time they had been 5 cents as their standard price was back in the 20s and 30s when my parents were kids, long before even i was born, and i was born in 1948!

magazenes like analog and model railroader were $.50 untill the price of paper skyrocketed.

the so called gas crysises of the 70s were cooked up by the robber barrons of international oil corporatocracy as an excuse to raise prices.

amtrak came on line to let the railroad companies off the hook from having to run passinger opperations as the i.c.c. had been requiring by law for them to continue up untill then and they had been fight tooth and nail by doing everything they could to discourage ridership. to be fair to them, they were, and still are, also being forced to pay for the right of ways of their competition, which didn't and still doesn't seem entirely equatable.

but there were, as there still are, a LOT of people who didn't want alternative transportation thrown out with the bath water. amtrak was the compromise that came out of all that.

ford was mr pardon me. james brown (who died on practicly the same day) did more for this (u.s.a.) country.

helsinki accords would have been great if raygun hadn't screwed up everything, like bush II, deliberately, which to me is not only malpheasance, but outright treason. especialy undermining all the regulatory agencies we fought for in the 60s and 70s by putting those regulated in charge of them.

bush I stopped the overt proccess of doing so, but did nothing to reverse the devistation to the constitution raygun had wrot, and which bush II boasts of continuing.

clinton wasn't great and did a bunch of dumb ass things (cafta/nafta, which mostly sounded good at the time), but at least he made an appearance of trying to reverse some of the crap. i know this is going beyond the 70s but they were what the 80s were an irrational and irrisponsible knee jerk reaction to on the part of fanatical idiologs pretending to be "conservative" whatever the hell that really means, if it means anything at all other then attacking the constitution and joe sixpacks real freedoms and rights.

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Mopeds were the rage in the U.S. in the late 70s, although they were popular in Europe for decades before that. In many states you didn't need a license, helmet, insurance, or registration. The politicians started regulating it heavily in the 80s and moped sales slumped.

A candy bar was about 10 cents in the mid 70s then jumped to about 40 cents by the late 70s. Prices could be seen going up by the week at the grocery stores. Consumer electronics were much more expensive in the 70s compared with today's prices when adjusted for inflation.

Nixon initially appointed a good panel to investigate the allegations but when they started uncovering the truth, he fired them and put Robert Bork in their place to head the investigation. What a great guy. You may recall Bork was a failed nominee for the Supreme Court in the 1980s. After the failure, he appeared on Pat Robertson's 700 Club and spilled the beans about all the right wing religious fundamentalism he would have tried to push through the Supreme Court. There were number of Nixon buddies had who initially defended him but later changed their minds. Even Billy Graham dumped Nixon after more information surfaced.

The bi-centennial was marred by Nixon and Vietnam but people still had some enjoyment through it.

The political landscape started changing greatly around 1980. It's been conservative since then and became reactionary post-911.

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