I see a lot of posts nostalgic for days gone by, say the early 70s. Wanna know what it was like? Try this for one day of what it was like before I was 16 years old:
- Better plan to try this when it is not summer - no air-conditioning for most people, not in your car either.
- Take your cell phone and find a spot on the wall where you might have a land line. Keep your phone on the counter next to that spot. You may use your phone, but you may not go more that four feet from your imaginary land line.
- No computer
- No social media
- No dishwasher - they started becoming more common in the later 70s.
- You can watch broadcast TV (3 channels) and PBS
- Probably no remote control on TV - use your remote to walk up to the TV to simulate changing the channel each time you want to do so or adjust the volume
- No microwave
- If you want to take a photo, you need film, flashbulbs, and a camera that will take 12 bad photos and maybe one good one. You won't know this for a week though, because it takes that long to get the film developed.
- No ATM
- No automatic lights or Alexa
- No seatbelts. If you had a newer car, you might have had seatbelts but it wasn't until the 80-90s before we had seatbelt laws.
- For this one day, no email
- Music must be played either on a record player, radio, or cassette tape. You will be nervous if you try to record from the radio or copy a tape because you can be arrested for that.
- Research for school: you'll need to go to the library and use books.
- You can't drive your car more than 55 mph
- If you are in school, take the bus while it is still dark out. Teens didn't have cars.
And this is just a one day experiment of some things to simulate a day in the early 70s. These are just a few at-home conveniences. We could make another whole list about how pregnant women could be fired from their jobs, women likely not be able to get their own credit card or mortgage or business loan. How women could not access birth control or reproductive care. How LGBTQ+ people had no rights. How we, nationwide, treated people of color and other cultures and denied them their civil rights. How young men were being sent to die in a war we never should have been in. Young men, think of waiting for your number to be called and having no say if you want to go or not.
I challenge you to pretend for one day, in your own home, that it is early 1970s. But I also challenge you to think, while you are not on FB, of what we as Americans want for our future. Do you really want to go back to the "good old days"? I don't. There are lessons in the simplicity, but we aren't those people anymore. We are better than that.
