I dont want to take America all the way back to the days of our Founding Fathers.

[FarLeftFist]

That shit sucked for like 99% of the population. I like this America, I think we got a good thing going on here. We just need to continue forming a more perfect union, we'll get there, we're still young. In the 1700's life was absolutely terrible. Even the 1800's were terrible. I've never seen a photo from that era where anyone was smiling, always the same miserable face. FUCK RON PAUL!

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Indentured servitude, no rights for women, no indoor plumbing...

no bathtubs...

Everyone went to church on Sunday and listened to three hour sermons.

Horseshit all over the streets, no painkillers or decent medicine.

No radio, computers, or TV. Or electricity. Most work was farming, and the few jobs outside of that or merchant trading were backbreaking and disease-ridden.

They did have a lot of time to talk politics, though, even thought illiteracy was rampant.

[FarLeftFist]

4. Ron Paul's UTOPIA. A lawless society of savages where it's kill or be killed.

Unless you are the 1% who can afford your own personal armed security.

EDIT: Unless you are the 1% who can afford your own personal armed security, healthcare, and private schooling. The rest of you can just DIE in the name of free-market capitalism.

[guthenson]

8. Not even then, actually.

George Washington was one of the richest people in his time, but that didn't stop him from losing all of his teeth at a young age. I'd much rather be alive today with fluoride in the water, modern toothbrushes and toothpaste, etc.

Also back then, even the richest people didn't have internet, TV, telephones, refrigerators, etc.

By today's standards, life back then was horrible, even if you were in that 1%.

[johnnie]

2. In my short 47 years

Life is good here. The US is fine and the people whining about how bad things are getting are just a bunch of young shits who know only what they see on the internets.

[Angry Dragon]

6. ..............

[johnnie]

9. This place has become a joke

[haele]

12. Agreed - I'm a hard-working 52 year old -

And I know I have had less opportunity to succeed than my parents did. In the mid 1960's, a man of 25, who had spent 6 years in the CANF after high school, could work full-time as a mechanic at a gas station and make enough money to go to college (on a somewhat modified GI Bill), raise a family with two kids, buy a house and a car, and still take a one-week camping vacation every year.
Even 20 years ago, being able to sucessfully accomplish any one of those things would have been impossible for a man or a woman in that same situation without some serious sacrifice of family time.
As a society, we're being dragged back to the 1910's, with a small middle class, an even smaller, isolated upper class, and a huge, underemployed working class who were supposed to remain ignorant, have litters of children to keep them in borderline poverty, and die fairly young so there wouldn't be a large number of retirees to support.
It was also still pretty much an agrarian nation; large expanses of frontier that was still available for the more uppity workforce to escape to if they couldn't handle being basically an indentured servant dependant on an employer, a "better class" of person, for their survival. Three generations living under one roof, because one person couldn't make enough to take care of one family and still make it after old age caught up with them and made working enough to keep a roof over one's head and food on the table problematic.

As if somehow, FDR's America, with a thriving, educated, upwardly mobile working middle class nuclear family was supposed to have been an anomily.

We are going backwards. And anyone over 40 who hasn't already got a million or so stashed safely away and his or her home already paid for should be worried - it's not going to get any easier, and if you have kids, they're to have less in the way of opportunities to succeed than you did when you graduated high school.
Hard work means nothing if you don't also have enough luck to have the real opportunity to get ahead - not just an occasional good sales job. When there are 10 people looking for every job available - and more than half of those jobs are dead-end low paying jobs, how upwardly mobile can this upcoming generation be?

Haele

[elleng]

3. and those who say they do don't know what the f* they're talking about.

[TheKentuckian]

5. Neither do those who pretend to, their shit didn't even fly then.

They just go with that as a negotiation point that sounds good enough to ears that digest by the soundbite.

Reality is the founding is not acceptable either and their image the peddle is false or we'd be the Somalian Trade Confederacy long ago.

[guthenson]

7. Technology

Once a technology has been invented, it can never be uninvented. I don't think radios, TVs, modern medicine, etc., will be going away.

[getdown]

10. wait

you were serious?

[Sarah Ibarruri]

11. I couldn't agree more. Life was shit back in the time of the forefathers, and

even after the Revolution, the majority lived a fairly hellish life, while the upper classes lived nicely.

[HeiressofBickworth]

13. "The Way We Never Were"

This is a book that takes the rose-colored glasses off of the nostalgic view of the past. With so many people (if we can call Repubs "people&quot clamoring for a return to the good old days, the truth of those days should be examined.

[HopeHoops]

14. I sort of appreciate indoor plumbing.

[Taitertots]

15. Neither do I, it was terrible for anyone who wasn't a rich old white man

Who is suprised that a rich old white man is the only one trying to get us there?

[MarkCharles]

16. Black folks, women, and kids didn't have it so good at all.

The only people who did pretty well were rather rich, but even THEY still had out-houses.
Most colonists in the few cities were merchants, or laborers, and a few craftsmen.

Teachers and preachers were those with perhaps the most interesting lifestyles, literate, able to travel away from home for extended periods of time. Farmers were seldom able to travel more than a day's journey (20-30 miles) away from their farm, for much of their lives.

Farmer families were what made up much of the rest of the countryside. Most of those farmers were barely more than subsistence farmers, perhaps with one crop or some animals or poultry, eggs and milk with which to make any extra cash. Their farms were simple, poorly heated, seldom more than 4- 6 rooms, with sheds attached for wood, small animals, etc.

Only children of the wealthy were given an education to the point of literacy, except in a few northeastern colonies like Massachusetts. Most children were working on their family's farm or business by the time they were 14, and often married by the time they were 17. Few people lived beyond 50, with a high number of women dying at childbirth.