In the era after World War 2 and during the Cold War, there existed a very optimistic outlook for American life. This was not just "The World of Tomorrow" but also just basic assumptions of a life better than the average American had experienced before. That being a world where everyone lived in suburbia with white picket fences, a swimming pool and atomic families and there would be peace, tranquility and unbridled and uninterrupted economic growth and the world would keep modernizing and developing and we'd have better living through chemistry and we'd keep developing towards a perfect society (suspiciously with only white people).
That thought then ran into the wall of the 1960s and social developments such as the race issue and the struggle for civil rights, women's rights and disillusioning things such as the war in Vietnam and the brutality of racism and radicalism. And increasingly there grew a feeling of American decline and social decline, and a fear for the future replaced an optimism for it and for the present: there could be a dictatorship, atomic tests were poisoning food and world war was going to happen, the government lied and killed the Kennedy's, the nation was going to continue to decline and collapse and crime was going to rise and rise and that was going to be the new normal, the population of the world was going to grow to the point where it would be unsustainable, the Soviets would out pace us and conquer the globe, the Iranians would create a Middle East empire of radicalism, gas would be an ungodly amount of money forever and run out in a few years, etc. It is important to note, though, that even through that pessimist school of thought and its rise in the 60s and 70s and on, there still remained that optimistic one.
The truth of how things turned out lay in between optimism and that pessimism. Certainly we didn't get moon bases and the white picket fence dream didn't pan out, but the nation didn't collapse into a Mad Max situation either. But it still remains that there are many things that went wrong or turned out badly and wounds we never properly healed.
The challenge here is to create the best possible post-World War 2 world, and to attain as much as possible that "white picket fence hope" of a society and way of life.
That thought then ran into the wall of the 1960s and social developments such as the race issue and the struggle for civil rights, women's rights and disillusioning things such as the war in Vietnam and the brutality of racism and radicalism. And increasingly there grew a feeling of American decline and social decline, and a fear for the future replaced an optimism for it and for the present: there could be a dictatorship, atomic tests were poisoning food and world war was going to happen, the government lied and killed the Kennedy's, the nation was going to continue to decline and collapse and crime was going to rise and rise and that was going to be the new normal, the population of the world was going to grow to the point where it would be unsustainable, the Soviets would out pace us and conquer the globe, the Iranians would create a Middle East empire of radicalism, gas would be an ungodly amount of money forever and run out in a few years, etc. It is important to note, though, that even through that pessimist school of thought and its rise in the 60s and 70s and on, there still remained that optimistic one.
The truth of how things turned out lay in between optimism and that pessimism. Certainly we didn't get moon bases and the white picket fence dream didn't pan out, but the nation didn't collapse into a Mad Max situation either. But it still remains that there are many things that went wrong or turned out badly and wounds we never properly healed.
The challenge here is to create the best possible post-World War 2 world, and to attain as much as possible that "white picket fence hope" of a society and way of life.