[From “Mailvox: The World We Lost”]

Request to the GenX crowd — what is your best anecdote or memory or description of “how things used to be”? The before time, that we millennials and younger have no memory of

The entire suburban 20-house neighborhood of 20-30 children between the ages of 5-11 playing outside, all day, every Saturday during the school year and every weekday too during the summers. My favorite was the huge Capture the Flag games the older kids would organize sometimes in the evenings after dinner. We’d play until it got too dark to be able to see very well, then everyone would go home[…]
The freedom and sense of community was entirely different than today. Many of the neighborhoods look more or less the same from the outside, but since the mid-1990s, one no longer sees large packs of kids playing outside together[…]
And if you want conclusive evidence that immigrants to America will never, ever, understand the world of the 1950s-1980s that we lost, consider the perspective of one immigrant from Portugal who still doesn’t know what we’re talking about despite having spent most of her adult life in the USA

Well, excuse me, I lived in a village growing up. And while I miss some things, sometimes, if you think for a little very Odd kid it was an ideal environment, you’re out of your ever loving mind. In fact, it wasn’t an ideal environment for anyone, judging by the epic fights and factions. Because people in point of fact had very little in common, and were together by utter necessity, which means that the group enforced absolute conformity and you couldn’t escape

Whoever said anything about poor rural villages full of inbred Iberian peasants? That was never our world and it certainly isn’t the loss that we’re lamenting. These days of diversity and immigration are most certainly not “the good new days” in the eyes of any genuine American