“When I was a kid…” was a phrase I thought I would be glad never to hear again but now I find I’m saying it more and more to my own son. My son of course responds in much the same way I did when my dad said it to me. With the glazed over stare of indifference and a glib, “Okay, well thanks for that little factoid dad.” For better or worse, I guess some things never change.

For better or worse some things do. Let's take a look see. When I was a kid a slinky was a toy spring that we watched roll down the stairs, seriously. Can you imagine the look on your kids face today if you gave him a spring for his birthday? The Barbie doll was just about the most wholesome toy on the planet for a girl. Now every other Barbie is surrounded by controversy. Her boobs are too big and she’s too shapely creating an improbable roll model. The black Barbie was selling for less than the white Barbie. And now there is a tattooed Barbie! That’s right, the Malibu beach babe got inked!

You got a whole lot more bang for your buck back in the day as well. The average income was around five grand per year and the average house was about nineteen thousand. So it wasn’t incredibly hard for a single income family to pay off their mortgage in ten years. Now, the average combined income for a Canadian family is around seventy five thousand. The average house costs around three hundred and thirty thousand. Add to this the bank lending rates and you see that it now takes two people twice as long to buy a home made with a fraction of the quality.

With all that extra income rolling around way back when even lower income families could afford to do more. There were six kids in our family and we were not well off but we always had lots of toys on birthdays and at Christmas. We were involved in sports programs. We went on camping trips. We spent every other weekend in the summer picnicking. In short we had a blast. Television was something you did on Saturday mornings or on cold, rainy days. Computers were something only Nasa and other mega buck institutions had. Video games were non existent.

The seventies was all good too. Yes, we really did dress like the Brady Bunch. Omg was written, ‘Oh my God!’ And we used pens and note books to write with. There were no security guards in our schools, no metal detectors and no marketing campaigns by clothing or soft drink manufacturers. The average teen could afford to keep a used car going because gas was about 35 cents a litre. Then the OPEC oil embargo happened in 76 and teens were looking at gas prices doubling over night. Not surprisingly the bumper sticker that said, ‘Ass, Gas or Grass: No one rides for free,’ also appeared around that time. So much for the sixties free love etc movement. Movies with a message like China Syndrome and Network were ignored by the masses. (Chernobyl and Fox Television are the reasons we should have paid more attention). Instead we flocked to Jaws, Rocky and Star Wars and I loved them all.

Rock and Roll was born in the fifties and made into a monster by the likes of Bill Hailey and Elvis. In the sixties Rock and Roll was a notoriously rebellious teenager. By the seventies Rock and Roll had given birth to a number of love children: Soul, disco, metal, punk, prog, glam and new wave. All of these children spawned monsters of their own and popular music was at an all time high. From Michael Jackson to Pink Floyd to Fleetwood Mac, record companies were seeing unprecedented sales. Music venues went from fifty and a hundred seat bars to fifty and a hundred thousand seat stadiums. Life was a grand party and everyone was invited.

For me I think culturally as a society, we peaked somewhere at the end of the seventies or the beginning of the eighties. I think the beginning of the end happened when we allowed the T.V. to do our thinking for us and the back lash was a new generation devoid of any real imagination. The sequel was born, Jaws 2, Rocky 5, Star Wars 6, Debbie Does… everybody! Music didn’t fare any better. Where the seventies saw the birth of keyboards and synthesizers, the eighties saw keyboard samples and loops. Where the seventies had complex rock operas and concept albums, the eighties had extended play versions of dismally conceived formulaic drivel. And video killed the radio star. It wasn’t all bad though, Ferris Bueller, The Lost Boys, The Blues Brothers, Raiders of the Lost Ark all came out of the Eighties as did such bands as The Police and U2.

By the mid eighties and into the nineties the world both feared and embraced all things computerized and all things global. Cash registers disappeared, typewriters faded away and computers took their place. Television screens were taken over by VCRs and video game consoles and the internet was born. The EU was born. The United Nations had become a spineless debating club. North America became more of a military state and less a democracy every day. The IMF and the world bank roped developing countries into hundreds of free trade and privatization arrangements that caused massive debts, unprecedented poverty and out of control environmental and human rights violations. Dope and booze as recreational mood altering substances were placebos compared to Prozac and crystal meth. Suddenly Aldous Huxleys Brave New World wasn’t science fiction anymore.

Hey what the hell happened? This started out as a fun, nostalgic look at entertainment then and now. How did it turn into a social commentary rant? You might ask yourself this instead. How did the responsible news sources become fast food junk sources and how come the real news comes from satirists like Bill Maher and Rick Mercer? The short answer is bad things happen when good people zone out.