For the decade you were born, what was the most influential societal or cultural change?
From five years before your birth year, and five years after, that ten years, what development, event, or cultural change most effected your country or the world?
Answers ( 3 )
Let's see... born 1957, so 1952 through 1962, right?
LOTS going on then.
And I haven't even been born yet!
And, of course, I was finally given to the world as a whole.
So now to winnow them down to Only One. America has voted- or, at least I have- and I must give my vote for most influential societal or cultural change in the decade surrounding my birth to...
Equality Issues
They are still on-going. There are still problems- STILL!- today, It isn't just race- although that is the biggest bugaboo- it is sexism and gender issues and ageism and all kinds of problems of measuring people according to some specific and unnecessary yardstick. It has to STOP!
“And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.” ~Sir Terry Pratchett; The Night Watch
I came into the world eleven years and two months after the end of WW2. My parents, in their mid-twenties when I was born, had experienced the tremors of the war on their parents' farms and in public school in rural Ontario. As children in a pacifist religious community, the Mennonites, they probably had no opportunity to express their fears at home but once grown up and in their own home no one stopped them from talking. And talk they did.
Off the top of my head, the fifties were the decade of global recovery from the Second World War. Couples got together and produced offspring like it was humanity's last chance to populate the planet. The label "Baby Boomers" has followed us down the decades. But I'm finding much more in History.com, information that explains so many of the fears and concerns expressed by my parents while I was growing up in the sixties.
QUOTE: The 1950s were...the dawn of the Cold War...
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I never realized that the Cold War only started about the time my parents came of age, i.e. in the 1950s, but that explains the day my father shared an article from the newspaper with Mom and she replied that "They can't know in Ottawa when our hay is fit to put up." I hard the fear in her voice. Ottawa was hundreds of miles to the north east and the way the weather worked it was at time impossible for the neighbourhood farmers to know if the other man's hay was ready to put up. Let alone some city-slicker government official in far-off Ottawa. It also explains the day my primary grade public school teacher said the next time the enemy would probably fly in over the North Pole. Adults were scared big time.
From the above article I find a number of other products of the fifties that became part and parcel of Western culture:
QUOTE: Music marketing, changed, too: For the first time, music began to target youth.
I was born the year after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. American triumphalism and imperialism were at their peak, Communism was surging and the Cold War was beginning. Miraculously, we survived. Now we're choking ourselves and the Earth with our consumer society successes. Hard to say which is worse.