The Annoyed Man wrote:I'm with dukesean. Yes, a lot of things were better in 1957, but also a lot of things were worse.
[rant]
I am a man of faith, and I believe that mankind has existed in a fallen world ever since Adam and Eve's original sin. When Jesus walked the earth, women and children were chattel with little or no social standing, priests had reduced love of God to love of Religion and the Law, petty theft was punishable by crucifixion, and diseases such as leprosy were believed to be an indicator of lack of personal righteousness.
In 1957, it was a crueler world for people of color in this country. In 1957, you would have never had a black Secretary of State (Powell or Rice), a black female National Security Advisor (Rice), a black male or white female presidential candidate (Obama and Clinton). I don't mean to imply that race or gender ought to be a factor in any of these positions. In fact, it ought not to be a factor, which also means that it should not be a reason for exclusion either.
In 1957, automotive design had not yet benefited from modern technologies and cars were not as safe as they are today - and yet the propensity of humans to drive them outside their design envelope was as strong then as it is today.
In 1957, the space program was in its earliest infancy, and none of the wonderful technologies existed yet which we take for granted now. How many jobs exist today directly due to technologies that have trickled down from the space program?
IMHO, one thing that hasn't changed from 1957 to 2007, and which I believe is the reason our society is worse today than it was then, is man's propensity to distance himself from God. The parable of the Prodigal Son is close to my heart. The father hiked up his robes and danced for joy when his son returned to the family fold, and the son was blessed in many ways by returning.
Our society at large and its culture have become emblematic of the Prodigal Son. We permit ourselves today the formerly unthinkable. In 1957, if you wanted to obtain pornography, it was difficult but do-able, but it also carried a high risk of being discovered, and it had a monetary and social price. Today, you can turn on your computer in the privacy of your own home and get it for free; and unless you take the action of placing yourself into an accountability relationship with someone in order to beat the addiction, nobody will know about it. I was talking with my father one day about marijuana use when he was a teenager in the 1930s, versus when I was a teenager in the 1960s. He told me that he knew of a couple of guys in high school who smoked pot, but that they also were the same guys who stole cars and went to jail (and jail was harder time in 1957 than it was 2007). The girls that did it back then were also the girls who "had bad reputations." When I was a teenager, more than half the people I knew smoked pot, and the laws were right at the cusp of beginning to loosen. Nowadays, there tends to be little or no social stigma attached to it, but you have to ask yourself, "why are people so unhappy that they feel the need to take a chemical vacation from reality?"
That same computer which can be used for evil, can also be used for good, so the computer itself is not evil. Like a gun, it's use, and the fallout from its use, are entirely dependent upon the heart of the person sitting at the keyboard. I am unashamedly Christian, and I personally believe that we were created by God with a Jesus shaped hole in our hearts, and Jesus is the only thing that will fill that hole. Men and women can spend their lives trying to find things that will fill that hole - sex, drugs, money, possessions, big houses, and fancy cars - but nothing fills it the way Jesus does.
But even if you are not a Christian, it is important to believe in something that is bigger than yourself, and that provides you with some kind of Judeo/Christian moral underpinning, and to which you hold yourself accountable; because in the absence of that, you will be accountable to nothing, and all you will believe in is yourself and your own capacities; and there will be no moral restraint on your trying to define the limit of those capacities. Mankind has been that way ever since the fall.
And that, I believe, is why we wax nostalgic for the past.
[/rant]
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Anyone remember the good ol' Jim Crow laws? I went crying to my mother, I didn't understand the man's anger and to this day I still don't. 
It doesn't look like public prayer has helped those students with much of anything, other than teaching them to hate those who worship differently from the majority. Are the students' nooses and swastikas simply childish pranks or is there something roiling below the surface? 
Not too many years ago, a long serving county sheriff was forced to move his family away because of the taunting his child endured within that holier-than-thou school district. 