What Happened To My World? | Philip A. Farruggio

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Philip A. Farruggio -- World News Trust

April 13, 2015

My dear friend and renowned clairvoyant, Barbara S. of Seaford, N.Y., sent me a six-minute nostalgic YouTube video about Brooklyn, NYC, circa the 50s and 60s.

It would take this writer far too much time citing anecdotal evidence to show how great it was then as compared to... NOW!

Imagine city beaches on hot and steamy days when the water was not polluted with runoff waste and garbage? We had the milkman delivering glass containers of fresh "cream on the top" milk to our doorstep.

There were a myriad of "Mom and Pop" retail shops in every neighborhood throughout our diversified borough. The mall was still a thing of the future... thank goodness for that! There were supermarkets, yes indeed, but most of our Moms (yeah, lots of families only needed one breadwinner in those days) would still frequent the local butcher, bakery, produce store etc.

I can recall when, during my youngster years in the 50s, we had an old Italian family around the corner that grew all kinds vegetables and lettuce... and sold them at real low prices. Many families, especially the Italian and Jewish ones, loved to order old fashioned Seltzer from... who else, the "Seltzer Man!" He would come by our block each week to pick up the empties and refill our orders. Imagine!

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http://worldnewstrust.com/what-happened-to-my-world-philip-a-farruggio

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1. Today, Wall Street would punish such inefficient service delivery, high wages, and so many jobs.

Just doesn't fit their business model.

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2. The delivery men were the service workers of their day.

Not high-paid factory jobs.

Notice when the peak median and mean incomes were. Not his idyllic '50s and '60s, although poverty rates were falling in the late '50s and early '60s, and continued their downward trend into, IIRC, the early '70s.

(It's also worth pointing out that pollution levels were already on the decline by the time the Clean Air Act and other environment legislation passed, and basically had the same kind of dates/trends as the poverty rate. Much of the trash on today's beaches is just that--trash, mostly from people who can't be bothered to pick up after themselves, who dump trash into the trash bins and when it blows out or falls out can't be bothered to deal with it. Not their responsibility. A small-scale tragedy of the commons. At the same time, they don't have beach-combing machines as much as they used to. It was always fun to watch those things at dawn render the filthy beaches from the previous day pristine again.)

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3. Easier to do in a country with 1/2 of the population of today

And of course this doesn't describe the extreme poverty that many people lived in back then, or the spotty health care.

The good old days, easy to look through rose colored glasses at them.