“Think of all the hate there is in Red China, then take a look around to Selma, Alabama …”
Barry McGuire might have been wrong.
We weren’t really on the “Eve of Destruction” in 1965, but we sure were on the even of an era and which more and more people were hating more and more people all the time.
When we look back at 1965 — at least in this country — we see the end of a golden era of sorts. We had gone just far enough on civil rights that Jim Crow-ism had basically been outlawed with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act a year later. Gay people were still in the closet, but at least the plague of AIDS was the better part of a generation away.
Women were still second-class citizens in many ways, but most babies were still born to two-parent families and the two parents were married to each other.
The American economy was still booming and the gap between rich people and the working class was about as small as it would ever get.
Vietnam was becoming a problem, but not yet.
To people who grew up in this century, 1965 must seem like a golden age. People had good jobs, folks pretty much got along and much more so than now, people minded their own business.
Is minded a word? Mound? Oh well …
The thing is, it wasn’t so great in a lot of ways. I was 15 for most of 1965, and I certainly don’t remember thinking how wonderful life was. There was Vietnam, even if it wasn’t a big deal yet. There were racists battling against civil rights. And most people only got three channels on their television sets.
That last one was a little bit facetious.
There was actually something good about less entertainment on the television screen. First of all, there were very few stations outside of New York and Los Angeles that were on the air 24 hours a day.. Most of them signed off no later than 1 a.m., at the end of Johnny Carson on NBC, the late-night movie on CBS or whatever talk show was getting clobbered by Carson on ABC.
They signed off either with the National Anthem or with High Flight, which was pretty but strange as a signoff.
And with that, you turned off your television. There were no VCRs, DVD players or Tivos.
There was literally nothing on TV except a test pattern.
If you’re wondering what this has to do with a piece that started out about hate, it’s that three-channel, 18-hours-a-day TV served as something of a unifying factor. Shows were designed to reach the largest possible audience and to offend as few people as possible.
Those were the days of what we call “water cooler shows,” shows where people stood around the water cooler at work and discussed what had happened the night before. Not everyone watched “I Love Lucy” in the 1950s, but most people did. And in the summer of 1980 it seemed as if everyone everywhere was arguing about who shot J.R. Ewing on No. 1 show “Dallas.”
Sure, there were people outside the mainstream on the far left and the far right, but there weren’t TV or radio outlets sending them out to everyone and in the days before the Internet, they had a much more difficult time finding each other.
It isn’t just political, either. Just being outside the mainstream doesn’t make someone evil, but iimagine people with the very worst impulses and desires among us. Imagine a child molester who 60 years ago might have thought he was alone in his evil but now sees there are others like him.
Without all these modern “conveniences” — Internet, 24-hour cable news on TV — Donald Trump would never have been president. In fact, the ‘net and so much TV have dumbed us down to the point where our Founding Fathers wouldn’t even recognize us.
Maybe we could stop hating so much.
That would be a good first step.