The Challenges of The New World
Beyond the effect of forever removing fascism from the board of acceptable political systems in a modern nation (though one could argue the likes of Francisco Franco and Juan Peron dispute this, both would see dramatic falls from grace as the 1940s and 1950s went on), for much of the world the truly global conflict that was World War II also had the effect of all but eradicating racial bigotry in many of the world's advanced societies and beginning the end of it in others of less advancement. The path the Amigos had taken since the first black US Army regiments fighting the Spanish and Santanistas some eighty years before had been followed by much of the world, and the superb performance of so many units of color in so many different nations - the Canadian West Indies Rifles and First Nations Regiments, the Mexican Guanajuato and Mayan Regiments and the American California Guard, Texas Rangers, Tuskegee Airmen and 442nd Regimental Combat Team had led the way that had been followed by the Vietnamese and Malays who gave the Japanese such headaches in Southeast Asia, the Chinese and Filipinos who had so doggedly defended their homelands and the Indian Army that had first crushed the Turks and then made the Japanese pay dearly for trying to invade India and then became the anvil that the British and Australians beat the Japanese on to in Thailand. Beyond this, the media during the war in virtually all of the combatants were only too happy to speak glowingly of the heroism of their allies, with such spectacular successes and acts of heroism and sacrifice - the Mexican defense of Crete, the Indians crushing of the Turks in Thrace, the Canadians' 300 Spartans-like defense of Hong Kong, the Filipino Navy punching the Japanese Navy's mighty Yamato right in the face in the Sulu Sea, the Brazilians' awesome assault on Monte Cassino, the Royal Air Force's never-say-die fight against the Luftwaffe over southern England, Generals Patton and Kirk rolling right over the Afrikakorps - becoming legends across the world, and it contributed to the idea of racial bigotry being seen as an archaic concept in the modern world. This would have perhaps an even more vast effect on the world after the war, particularly as the colonial empires of the Europeans, particularly Britain and France, shifted into becoming associations with new nations as well as providing an impetus for the growing movements to raise as much of the world's standards of living as possible after the war. With the Amigos being joined by Latin America and Australia in providing the support to rebuild Europe, the aid of it also flowed out to places and nations that needed help outside Europe - India, Iran, North Africa, Malaya. For the Amigos and their allies this building up of their allies was also aimed at halting the growth of communism, a concern that got far more acute after the events of 1956 and 1957.
In the immediate post-war world, the soldiers returned home in triumph and with a burning desire to get their lives back on the move again and the vast majority did just that. The massive public works projects of the 1930s that were halted by the war came back in a major way, though many of the housing builds of the 1940s and 1950s were by design quite different. The explosion in the number of automobiles on the road led to the growth of suburbs, in many cases built around the new war plants built as part of efforts for victory in World War II, these suburbs usually being sprawling homes on larger plots of land and built with comfort and convenience in mind, with central heating (and in some cases air conditioning), provisions for modern appliances (gas or electric stoves, washing machines and dryers, refrigerators and freezers, microwaves in some cases) and more space than many older homes had had, solving a problem that became ever more acute after the war as a massive baby boom came to pass in the Amigos as well as much of the world. This boom led to a rapid expansion of education systems across the world in the 1950s and 1960s as governments scrambled to provide good educations for their massive next generation, in the process spending vast sums of education and social programs to improve the learning environments for the children involved, from an explosion in the use of school buses for transport purposes to the growth of extracurriculars and the re-development of school lunch programs and other nutrition education.
While the vast suburban developments the surrounded were in many cases ultimately swallowed into the cities they had been built on the edges of, it didn't stop it from causing a backlash early and often. While these developments had been created as a way of eradicating slums and giving people better places to live, by the mid-1950s the problems of it were becoming obvious and the issues of servicing these developments were real. The seedy commercial strips that had followed the people out were no one's idea of attractive, and the first shopping malls and commercial developments built around the automobile in the early 1950s had been proven to make the problems of ugly sprawl and a collapse in community cohesion worse rather than better. By the mid-1950s, many well-established cities changed their development plans, rebuilding parts of existing neighborhoods to make them more conducive to new residents. These places, in many cases described with such terms as 'neighborhoods in the sky', changed the conversation about the role of city centers. These developments usually ranged from mid-rise to towering high rises of in some cases over 30 stories, putting far more people into smaller areas of land. Recognizing the social issues this could cause, the creators of these developments wisely went to great lengths to make them friendly for families and their residents and equipping them with both many elements of modern life in the buildings themselves but also extensive amenities - swimming pools and hot tubs, parks, playgrounds, stores of all kinds - and rapidly growing the development of 'dens' and 'hobby rooms' specifically meant for people to indulge their interests as well as having their new homes equipped with so many of the same amenities as the new suburban homes. By the 1950s, the idea of the social mobility in the societies of the Amigos was shifting, as while car culture was widely popular in all three nations it was recognized that few cities could even begin to be rebuilt for the automobile and attempts to do so had had mixed results in many places, and the denser areas offered many amenities in a proximity that was simply impossible in many of the suburbs. The debate over the best courses of action for housing new people raged through the 1950s and 1960s, and all the energy crisis did was amplify the debates.
While there had been great debate about the paths to take for the modern world in the years before the energy crisis, the sudden and massive rise in fuel prices dramatically changed the equilibrium. While virtually all of the cities of the Amigos still built their highways, mass transit usage exploded in 1957-58, and thanks to the tireless efforts of countless cities, states, provinces and transit authorities, the sudden surge in usage led to improvements in service quality, which made leaving the car at home that much more attractive still. The cost of diesel fuel and the rapidly-growing nuclear energy industry resulted in the massive growth of electrified transit as cheap electricity was used in place of expensive diesel fuel, and many cities even resorted to restoring streetcar services that had been removed at times in the past - Havana, Seattle, Montgomery, Atlanta, Denver, Miami, Washington, Vancouver, Halifax, Guadalajara and San Juan all did this, among many others - and the massive transit building boom of the 1960s that followed the energy crisis found wide-scale support among both politicians and the public.
This boom's long lasting was helped along in no small amount by the fact that by the mid-1960s the industry involvement in the transit development was truly vast - GM's locomotive division was producing huge numbers of transit vehicles, Chrysler was a shareholder in the American Locomotive Company and Gillig, Ford had bought bus manufacturer Flxible, AM General had teamed up with German manufacturers MAN and Neoplan for the bus market, Mercedes-Benz was marketing buses in North America (and finding some customers), the Governments of Canada and Ontario had set up their own transit vehicle manufacturers in the Urban Transit Development Corporation (UTDC) and Orion Bus Industries and Boeing, Rohr Industries, Budd, Siemens and Kinki Sharyo were all looking to be involved in the rail vehicle market themselves. With this level of competition and the needs of the post-Energy Crisis world, the development of new vehicles happened quickly, and the new vehicles developed rapidly improved in quality and comfort - more-comfortable seats became the norm (and leather seats became common), air conditioning was equipped to virtually all vehicles (both buses or streetcars/LRTs) built after about 1963-64, many gained better insulation and better suspensions for ride quality. One transit system after another in those years began running 24 hours a day and continually improved service frequency on their routes, while adding newer ones all the time. Commuter trains, already common in some cities, were rapidly absorbed by municipalities (and states and provinces in some cases, with Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, Ontario and California being among the states and provinces in question) and grew dramatically in number, setting off a massive rush of the building of electric multiple units for North American cities in the 1960s and diesel commuter locomotives in others. Even foreign makers ended up getting into the act in some cases, as in the cases of GO Transit and AMT's purchase of Canadian-built (and rather different looking, though they were identical underneath) English Electric Class 55 Deltics in 1964 and the fact that many of the first generation of Siemens LRTs and MAN buses were in part or in their entirety built in Germany. The massive funds outlays did, however, get the desired results, and while GM and Ford-owned Flxible's "New Look" buses both became design icons, they weren't long before the "Modern Metrobus" designs of the mid to late 1960s - GM's RTS-II, Ford's Metro Urban, AM's General's Model 800 and the Gillig Phantom (which became the Chrysler MC200 Phantom in 1976) - began to push the older models out of service. Boeing's original LRV was a technical mess, but the Budd Metrocity, UTDC CLRV (Canadian Light Rail Vehicle), Rohr Model 860 and Chrysler Intrepid LRV vehicles proved remarkably capable, and as thousands of these were built in the 1960s and 1970s the aged PCC streetcars that formed the backbone of many streetcar systems were rapidly retired, though in more than a few cases the famed PCCs were saved from scrap by museums, private collectors or transit agencies themselves for repurposing.
The world of transit may have changed dramatically, but the world of cars changed much as a result of the energy crisis as well. At a stroke the massive land yachts of the Amigos in the 1950s were made completely obsolete, and while American Motors and its Rambler marque had been known for efficiency, the small and midsize cars rapidly rushed to market in 1959 and 1960 proved underwhelming machines - except for one, the revolutionary Chevrolet Corvair. The Corvair was a dramatic departure for General Motors, being a rear-engined car with an air-cooled engine (though that engine, a 24-valve, four-cam flat-six, was revolutionary in its own right) built on a unibody platform (another first for GM) and equipped with four-wheel-independent suspension, the Corvair looked, drove and handled like nothing GM had ever built....but such was its design and remarkable driving characteristics that it was an immediate hit, and GM sold over 700,000 of them in its first two years, creating the genesis of GM's rapid advancement in the science of cars in the 1960s. AM General got the second strike in the form of the AMC Javelin, introduced to massive fanfare at the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in April 1962. The first of what would be known as muscle cars, the handsome, quick, excellent-driving Javelin, equipped with independent suspension and introducing disc brakes to North American cars, was an equal to the Corvair in many ways and its superior in others, kicking off the "muscle car era" of the 1960s and selling in nearly the same numbers as the Corvair - 640,000 produced in its first two years - while the Ford Mustang, introduced in April 1964, added to the frenzy as other automakers raced to catch up. Where the mammoth General Motors went the other automakers of the Amigos were basically forced to follow, but in this case it had a similar result to many of the changes in the world of transit - the technological advancement of automobiles from the Amigos in the 1960s was rapid, with disc brakes and independent suspension being joined by forced induction, aluminum and fiberglass bodywork, disc brakes and anti-lock brakes, brighter headlights and LED taillights. Turbocharging replacing supercharging first in gasoline engines in the 1960s and then (later on, and with greater effect) with turbocharged diesel engines, which began to see truck use in the late 1960s and then in cars in the mid-1970s.
This advancement in personal transportation was also followed by a major growth in the 1960s in the riding of motorcycles. While many of the bigger motorcycles by the likes of Harley-Davidson and Indian were joined by smaller motorcycles made by Japanese (namely Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha) and European (Triumph, Norton, KTM, Moto Guzzi, Aprilia, Ducati and BMW) manufacturers, though it wouldn't be long before the bikes made by the Asians and Europeans were every bit as fast as their American rivals and the Americans rapidly figured out how to make strong motorcycles in smaller sizes. By the late 1960s, the growth of the "Outlaw Biker" culture had made an image in its own right, but it was an image that came to be seen as a real negative by many law-abiding motorcyclists in the 1970s, an image that was fought against bitterly both by motorcycle riders themselves as well as authorities, leading to the biggest of outlaw biker gangs (such as the infamous Hells Angels and their archrivals in the Bandidos) becoming social outcasts in many places and open harassed by police forces in some places, particularly in Canada, and many communities began to push back whenever many such bikers showed up, while also promoting clubs which openly fought against illegal activity, such as the Rock Machine (OOC: I'm stealing the name here, as the OTL Rock Machine were criminals), Road Warriors and Challengers, who also over time switched away from many of the styles of dress of the outlaw clubs. Despite the outlaws, in warm-weather regions the growth of motorcycling by the late 1960s was such that there were dedicated motorcycle garages built in many cities and parking structures having dedicated motorcycle spots in many others, and motorcycles became an integral part of life in the Amigos through the 1950s and 1960s.
The women in the workforce who had proven so useful during World War II for the most part left the workforce to make way for returning GIs (though by no means did all women in the workforce do this) only for many of the women to make their way back into the workforce starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the baby boom began to tail off and many began to feel a desire to have greater purposes to their lives. While this at first still led to some sexism, in many cases the bigots found themselves being the targets of their colleagues' disdain, and as with the racial bigotry once directed at Black, Hispanic and Native North Americans, the disdain rapidly sank away as more women entered the working world and proved themselves to be the equals to their male counterparts in more than a few cases. This additional growth in the number of people seeking jobs didn't end up being a particular issue namely due to the economic growth of the time, as well as the post-Energy Crisis feelings that a new world needed to be created to counteract the old one which had been so shaken by the events of 1956, 1957 and 1958. While those desires had been born from the desire to face the energy crisis, it wasn't long afterwards that that shifted once again, in large part owing to the baby boomers maturing into adults beginning in the early 1960s and their desires to add to the new world that was appearing before their eyes.
Indeed, life changed as those young people, who had grown up in an era of prosperity never before seen by humanity, began to make their impact on the world. While their material needs had never been threatened in any way and they had a better education and greater life opportunities than any generation before them, many of these young people had come of age feeling their lives were a bit empty, even as the massive building of infrastructure and the growth in new industries, transportation systems and social structures that defined the 1960s accelerated with the times. This created the "counterculture" movements of the 1960s, which manifested themselves in many different ways in different places but found many common themes. From the growth of rock and roll music that began with Elvis Presley and the "Rebel Without a Cause" style manifested by the likes of James Dean and Steve McQueen to the British Invasion of the 1960s led by the likes of the Beatles (as well as overtly-activist North American music performers in the likes of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan), along with the end of the Hays Code in 1962 and the growth of filmmaking during the period. The young people's styles of clothing got far more shocking, with the loud suits, greasy hair and shiny leather jackets of the 1950s leading directly to the mod look of the 1960s, with young women sporting styles and articles of clothing - bikinis, miniskirts and go-go boots - that at first absolutely shocked their parents. This counterculture didn't outright reject many of the politics of the time - far from it - but instead desired to shift it into a direction they more approved of. As its participants saw it, they were trying to move the world toward living up to the values it espoused - to make "peace and love," the words on so many lips in the late 1960s, a manifestation and not just a nice thing to say. So the "flower power" movement they created intersected with the Campaign For The Less Fortunate, led by the charismatic Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and many of the young people established a new paradigm of service, working in community centers, helping to build housing for the poor, working in hospitals, doing all sorts of things that their parents, initially put off by the long Beatles haircuts and the girls' miniskirts, were surprised to see. In the process, their actions normalized many elements of this culture, and as the decade went on their views of the world became ever more popular and accepted, with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, initially outright loathed by earlier generations, came to be much more accepted and welcoming in mainstream society by the end of the decade.
This groping for spiritual fulfillment ultimately led to something of a spiritual revival in the West that has been described as a Third Great Awakening. Like America's previous Great Awakenings, which had spawned groups like the Shakers and the Mormons (the latter of whom in particular benefitted enormously from the steady reduction in religious bigotry that came with time), the Great Awakening that rose out of the 1960s led many at first to seek answers from gurus - Eastern philosophies were, seemingly overnight, fashionable - and from unconventional groups and sources. In the end, though, the mainstream faiths would benefit from this new burst of energy. They hadn't been rejected wholesale, either - the Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and many mainstream Protestant faiths in particular had gained a great deal of new prestige from their heroic stance against Nazism in World War II, not the least Pope Pius XII's bull of excommunication against Hitler. But the new adherents brought a new energy and a new sense of excitement that had the effect of clearing the cobwebs in many a church, and of bringing forth new ways doing everything from evangelizing to carrying out mission work. These differences at first created stark contrasts with the existing spiritual hierarchies, but as like so many things, over time these new adherents made their own feelings known, leading the growth of what was called "the Religious Left" in North America by the late 1960s.
The Eastern philosophies that came to become well-known in North America in the 1960s brought its own visual and design styles as well, with one highly-visible appearance being the growth of Eastern fashion influences in the 1960s, particularly among women - Indian saris and Asian kimonos and cheongsams that appeared as fashionable clothing in the late 1960s for many women at first divided opinion, though by the 1970s these had become welcomed by many of the societies these had come from as many of their designers and wearers were careful to show respect to its creators. Better suits became a common theme for men, along with "Ivy League" styles (which became a precursor to the 'preppy' styles of the 1970s) - polo shirts, chinos, Harrington jackets, striped T-shirts, sweater vests - which were joined as well by many of the Asian styles of their own by the late 1960s as well as "hippie culture" elements - tye-dye shirts, ripped blue jeans, baja jackets, bell bottoms - which allowed for a variety of styles seen as acceptable. This also manifested itself in regional differences, as residents of the West Coast of North America, much of Mexico and the Caribbean islands tended to dress much more casually than the suits of the central and eastern North America. Indeed, one result of this was the development of the "Southern Cut" suit of the 1960s, a highly-stylish development that mimicked many of the Mods but were designed specifically to be thinner and lighter weight to help deal with the intense heat and humidity of the south-central and southeastern United States, which were created and pushed hard by the fashion houses of Atlanta, Savannah, Miami, Charlotte and New Orleans. High-end watches from the likes of Rolex, Omega, Tag Heuer, Breitling, Montreal Watch Company, Patek Phillipe and Jose Rinaldo became common status symbols for men, while many of the clubs, guilds and societies of the time would identify their members through the use of special rings for both men and women.
Said philosophies also effected many views of people's views of themselves, leading to the first signs of eastern meditation teachers and yoga studios in the mid-1960s, concurrent with the sudden (and quite rapid) growth in the sport of bodybuilding, starting in Los Angeles in the late 1950s and rapidly spreading across the Amigos in the 1960s. Many warm-weather cities began to regularly build and install bodybuilding equipment in outdoor parks starting in the mid-1960s, and thousands of gyms and fitness centers appeared in the 1960s and 1970s as more and more men saw themselves going to gyms in an attempt to improve their physical fitness. Women-only gyms followed these, first being seen in numbers in the early 1970s, while whole chains dedicated to better food and supplements appeared around the same times, becoming some of the most rapid growth industries of the time. The great bodybuilders of the 1960s and 1970s - Reg Park, Steve Reeves, Sergio Oliva, Bill Pearl, Serge Nubret, Larry Scott, Dave Draper and Arnold Schwarzenegger - became icons in their own right, resulting in more than a few cases of these men moving into film and television in their own right, while some athletes also found fame making themselves out as examples of the greatest physical condition, with NBA basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain and NFL football star Joe Namath being notable examples of this. This desire to "get fit" was most seen in warm-weather regions but was seen to degrees pretty much everywhere, and led a boom in physical fitness that saw the average fitness condition of most of the Amigos improve in the 1960s and 1970s, and the growth of sports medicine and injury rehabilitation systems that followed this in the 1980s would go on to revolutionize virtually all pro sports and dramatically improve the treatment of countless physical conditions.