Future Affairs

[Kaz]

I'm no sure if the lack of religion is the problem, it seems to me that many of the world's ills are caused by it, or at least the extreme versions of it! I like to think of myself as Humanist and think if we all treated others in the way we would like to be treated, no matter what their creed, colour etc, the world would be a much better place! Too much intolerance seems to be the problem, and that is getting worse!

[Workingman]

Quite agree, Kaz. I also tend to the humanist line of thought and it has not made me any less spiritual, respectful or lacking in wonder than a committed believer in a deity or deities.

[medsec222]

One of the worst changes for me is that when I was a young girl, honesty really was the best policy. Now it is the dishonest ones who prosper the most, and the honest and decent ones are taken for mugs.

[Aggers]

One of the worst changes for me is that when I was a young girl, honesty really was the best policy. Now it is the dishonest ones who prosper the most, and the honest and decent ones are taken for mugs.

I quite agree.

[Workingman]

Strange times the post war years and the 50s, 60s and 70s.

During the war my mum and aunties had been employed building tanks, planes and making munitions aswell as turning out millions of uniforms. Come the end of the war they still craved their usefulness to society nd the world of work. They knew that they could do it because they had.

My older cousins, the ones who would become teenagers in the mid to late 50s picked up on vibes from their mums. They did not want to be the teenagers their parents had been any more than their mums wanted to be what their mums had been. They wanted thins to be different. They were the Rock 'n Roll generation, the pre Rockers, Mods and Hippies. Things did change for them, although there were still ties to the past: the pre-war times. Maybe that is where 'honesty was the best policy' idea comes from. A Golden age.

I became a teenager in the mid 60s and by then things really had changed. Going in to town on a Friday or Saturday night was not be done in groups of a few - mob handed was the way to go. If you rode a scooter you kept out of biker areas and vice-versa. If you were in a fight and went down then staying down was no guarantee the kicking would stop - as it had once been. Illegal drugs were becoming more popular and turf wars had already broken out. Communities were decimated during the slum clearances where they were moved from horizontal terraces to vertical ones - high-rise flats. The introduction of TV meant that parents could sit from the 6 o'clock news till bedtime in a soporific state many of them unaware of what their children were getting up to in the streets.

The 60s and 70s have a reputation for sex and drugs and rock 'n roll making them seem like an ideal time to be young. They were, to some extent, but there was a hell of a lot of unmentionable stuff going on under the surface, and they were the beginning of what we have today.