Over all - was life better 50 years go today - or was it worse?

[hunter]

37. It was the dark ages so far as my own medical care has gone.

Asthma and mental health issues were blamed entirely on parents (mostly mothers) or on the individual suffering these ailments.

In these modern times I simply take a couple of meds and it's all manageable.

I haven't been to an E.R. for these health issues since 1988 and the meds today are even better. What were once major health problems for me have become minor inconveniences. If I ever found myself back in the world of 1963 medicine I'd be in a pretty grim situation. I know, because I lived there, but thankfully not as an adult. As in adult in 1963 I'd have been dead or I'd be a crazy hermit living in the desert. (Some of my adult relatives actually were crazy hermits living in the desert...)

It's ironic that we've learned farm kids living with dirt suffer less asthma and other chronic immunological problems than kids raised in clean 1950's suburban utopias. My mom heard it over and over again, sometimes from medical professionals, that her housekeeping skills were inadequate or that she had a "smothering" personality. Our home situation was in reality so far out of the norm, beyond the imagination of conservative medical professionals, amateur psychologists, and "concerned" teachers, none of these criticisms were even applicable. I grew up in a household full of semi-feral artists, scientists, and dreamers. As kids we had full run of the place. All the neighborhood kids were at our house too, even a few who had been banned from the place by their parents.

There's a genetic component to my chronic health problems but I'm pretty sure the greater problem was air and water pollution. Lead in the smog we breathed, everything drenched in insecticides that have since been banned, mercury and other crap in the fish caught in Santa Monica Bay we ate, etc., etc., etc.

I remember horrible smoggy days in Pasadena or the San Fernando Valley of the sort that are now history, days when it hurt to breathe and everyones' eyes were red and watery, their throats sore, and you'd go to the grocery store with mom or grandma and chain-smoking workers and patrons would drop cigarette butts on the floor and crush them under their feet to be swept up by "stock boys," many of these "boys" middle aged (or even elderly) Black, Mexican, or Asian men.

That was not a better world.