Notes About The Poem
The line about buying guns in downtown NYC is based on what my father told me. He immigrated and stayed with relatives in NYC for a while, and one took him to a downtown gun store. The rest is based mostly on a brief quiz of my mother. The little girl shown is not her, but she was able to walk at that age to the park by herself, or to pick up a newspaper for her parents.
The Fifties
With nostalgia Mom looks back to the year
A little girl walking to Riverside Park, without fear
Except for the bowery, no homeless on the street
Kids played outside, lots of friends to meet.
A chocolate bar was 5 cents, a penny was copper through
You could buy a gun downtown, no-one would take it from you.
It was a period that didn’t excuse arson and looting
There were no alienated teens who dreamed of school-shooting.
Most kids had Mom and Pop, and extended family too
Op-eds groused that the president golfed, and nothing was new
I'd say that's better than the current polarization
Half of us can’t stand the rest of the nation.
Our money devalues, and the government has to borrow
But then a dollar today was still a dollar tomorrow
You didn’t get years of debt for college admission
A job in the summer could pay most of your tuition.
I've seen movies of the time, like North by Northwest
Mom liked Shane and Rashomon, and the Searcher's Quest
Movies and TV generally met a wholesome test
Though kids might dispute shows like “Father Know’s best”
In some ways it was worse, I don't want to pretend
Before her father's friends reached 70, they met their end
If you flew in an airplane there was more chance it fell down.
And police told blacks to stay away from NY’s downtown
.
You might think we were so much less tolerant then
But for current tolerance, I’d give one out of ten
A third of college kids would report their professor
For deviations from some template of victim or oppressor
Teachers can't discipline, and there’s a cost
For a teacher, any respect is lost
Teachers don’t like being kicked, punched, and reviled
Half a million vacancies now because the kids go wild.
Now we have freedom to take drugs, and choose our pronoun
But we have trillions of debts, and more want the system down
We didn’t know what we had, we risked all on the dice
The pendulum swung and did not usher paradise.
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