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Comment by newnewpdro | Hacker News Reader

Yep, ~1969 seems like peak USA in a number of ways. Music, psychedelics, muscle cars / car styling in general, clothing, journalism, what else?

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Lead in the air we breath. Coincides pretty much with muscle cars. Once they removed lead from gasoline, muscle cars withered for a few decades.

Indoor smoking.

Rampant discrimination, against ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ.

The "good ole days" generally aren't as good as we remember them.

Moon?

My whole adult life I wished I was living in a repeat of the 60s. Not because of the war or turmoil, sexism, racism, murder of people like MLK (sounds bad when you put it that way), but because of the freedom, the sense that america was moving forward. We didn't have our best days behind us. I never had that in my adult life.

Rose colored glasses. The 60s had the most terrifying increase in crime in living memory (one of many graphs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/...). Until MLKs death he and other civil rights movement leaders were incredibly unpopular (check polling of time). By most measures, now is less of a time when the best days are behind us.

That may be true, but I missed out on wild sex, drugs, rock and roll. And woodstock. :-)

Did you link to the right graph? That one shows most of the 60s still safer than the 00s.

It's the rate of change from good to bad that's scary. Crime doubled in 10 years!

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