They left out ‘be white.’ It was a horrific time for anyone else.
Yup that was the life for both my brothers (born in 1945 and 1950, me in 57). They kicked it just in time that is for sure.
ITT: Walter Sobchak.
That generation got paid $45 an hour in today’s value.
Are you thinking of a particular source? I couldn’t find substantiation for $45/h.
If you scale it to housing prices, it’s even more ridiculous.
Federal minimum wage in 1965 was $1.25/h, which is $12.69/h today. Looks like Alaska had the highest state minimum at $2.10, $21.32 today. Or were you taking more average rather than minimum wage?
They never said anything about minimum wage.
In 2023 median hourly wage was $19.24/h, vs in 1979 it was $4.44/h or $19.56/h inflation adjusted. (This data doesn’t go back to 1965 unfortunately)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185335/median-hourly-earnings-of-wage-and-salary-workers/
There is a reason median is used here… If you take into account the massive (and constantly growing) income gap, it’s obvious that things have gotten worse for the average American.
You’ve got it backwards, median takes into account income gap better. Mean would be much higher today because of the increasing income gap. That is why I used the median, so that interesting inequality would be less of a factor.
Idk who’s closer, guys. Where the sauce at :u
The 60s? Don’t have to fight in a war?
Are we just rewriting history to ignore Vietnam?
What % of the population actually fought in the war?
Page 45 of this PDF has a good chart. It shows that about 26.8 million men were draft eligible in that generation, and about 8.7 million enlisted, 2.2 million were drafted, and 16.0 million never served, including about 570,000 apparent draft dodgers.
About 2.1 million actually went to Vietnam, and about 1.55 million were in combat roles in Vietnam. 51,000 were killed.
So roughly:
- 41% of that generation of men were in the military
- 8% of that generation went to Vietnam
- 6% of that generation fought in Vietnam
- About 0.2% of that generation died in Vietnam
I guess that depends how poor and black they were.
Not enough to win it
Not everyone in the world is an American of course.
Picking up hitchhikers to Woodstock during the summer of '69 kind of narrows it down unless op was one of those maple syrup types.
Oh woops i broke my ankle and an anti war doctor said I’ll never walk again.
Oh woops I’m on extended vacation in Canada.
If you were not upper-middle class (or higher) and white, these really weren’t realistic options to avoid the draft.
Im continuing the idealistic boomer life we are talking about in this thread
all these pussies breaking ankles and citing bone spurs know a real man shits his pants right in front of the officer
found Ted Nugent’s lemmy account
Bone spurs.
There is no war in Vietnam
They were calling citizens in alternating groups of SSNs like a lottery. When it was my Dad’s buddy’s turn to show up for the medical he thought he’d fake extreme scoliosis, slouched one shoulder back and down, then half limped into the doctors office.
He was never even asked to take his shirt off and got excused on medical grounds.
Sounds like a typical trump republican
How did you hear about this? Seems a bit odd he’d brag about it over 50 years later. Yeah, son, I faked a condition to get out of the war like a total coward. Don’t think I’m any less of a badass though. I’m still a total badass.
Not wanting to bomb brown people in the name of fascism is quite a far cry from being a coward.
Vietnam should not have been invaded. Not wanting to participate in that shit show is just a reasonable moral decision.
I think if you asked the dude he’d admit he was doing it out of self-preservation as opposed to a moral stance.
He’s got a fascinating life story: His father was upper class in Russia in the early 20th C. and got drafted into the red army at the start of WW2 as an officer, but got captured by nazis and defected. When Berlin fell his father deserted, married the first German girl he saw and they emmigrated to the USA. My Dad’s friend was literally born on the boat over.
His father was highly educated but due to being in the two least popular armies in US history he had yearly visits from the intelligence services. Wasn’t allowed to get a good job and spent his entire life shifting chemical drums while the family grew up in poverty in New Jersey.
Self-preservation is a morally acceptable reason to not do something unless a reasonable case can be made that you should do that thing.
It’s not cowardly to not throw your life away for no good reason. Unless he had a moral reason to go, he had a moral right to not go.
Conscription produces bad soldiers and it’s morally reprehensible to conscript soldiers to invade a country that does not pose a threat to you.
Yeah I broadly agree. Idk when I was younger (and doing a lot more psychedelics) I had this idea that all soldiers were murders and being a conscientious objector was a moral imperative.
I’ve softened that view the older I’ve gotten but certain wars, like you point out, such as Vietnam or Iraq where the country isn’t posing a threat probably retain that same moral calculus.
It is different when your country is under threat like if you were Ukranian. However I’m not sure what I’d do if I were put in that situation. To be honest I might also try to chase self-preservation over anything else.
My Dad did a student elective in New York in 1977 as part of his medical degree. Met a few friends he’s been lifelong pals with and he talks about then often.
This guy’s name is Al and they are still pen pals to this day. I think he was a philosophy major so my Dad was impressed he could fake a condition so well (aside from just being impressed by the ballsiness of lying to the authorities to avoid fighting in an unjust war).
I could have gone to canada, I could have stayed in school
For the thousands of stories like this, there’s thousands more of people that gave their shit away for peanuts because they didn’t understand the value of what they had. My dad gave away so much shit for no reason it’s mind boggling. He sold a 61 Mustang for 15k in 1998.
First Mustang was the 64-1/2. Unless you mean the plane…
I’m starting to think this “Anon” guy just makes shit up!
I’ve met a boomer that basically has lived this greentext. I thought it was an exaggeration until I met him.
Which part? Personally I doubt the Roadrunner part.
Even just the 90s was crazy. Not calculated with inflation because I’m bad at maths but my folks’ house they bought in 1992 has more than quintupled in value.
Here’s a rule of thumb - the federal reserve has a target inflation rate that they try to meet, and that is usually around 2%. Therefore, if you want to do a quick party trick you can do the mental math that things have roughly doubled in price since the 90s. Recent covid related inflation, upcoming tariff related inflation, and 1970s inflation break the trend, but typically the value of money halves every 30-35 years.
A nice rule of thumb is that the doubling time for anything growing by a specific percentage is roughly 70 divided by that percentage. So inflation of 2% annually means something will be twice as expensive every 35 years. A 2% increase in energy use means we will use twice as much energy in 35 years. And those fossil fuel deposits (or other raw materials of choice) that are going to last a couple of hundred years “at current rate of use” will be used up twice as fast at 2% increased use every year in a mere 35 years and four times as fast in 70 years at which point those “hundreds of years” of reserves are probably almost gone.
If you want to get real nerdy about it this works because the natural logarithm of 2 is ~0.69
(1+i)^n = 2
n log (1+i) = log 2
n = log 2 / log (1+i)
For small numbers, log(1+x) ≈ x
n ≈ log 2/i
log 2 ≈ 0.69
n ≈ 0.69 / i
n ≈ 69/100i
Which is pretty close to 70/100i which is the approximation.
that is pretty nerdy, but I appreciate the thorough explanation
The 4chan/greentext community is so wise
I know someone who’s house value went up by 440% of her mortgage payment every month for 10 years.
Imagine getting paid four fucking fold on your rent. Jesus Christ.
And this is exactly why we can’t have affordable housing. All these boomers go from wealthy retirees to hungry tent dwellers like the rest of us.
My first house in 1999 was an older 4 bdrm on 14 acres of land for $50 grand. There were a lot of homes in the 30-40 grand range but lesser yards.
Now those same houses when they go up for sale are selling for 200-250k easily. (My place would be worth more than that… “hobby farms” like what I are selling for even 300-500k here now.)
For note: 50k from 1999 is worth 96k today
Also worth noting: in most areas, that price is exceptionally cheap for what he got, even for the time.
I wish I still had it, but a divorce about 15-20 yrs ago took care of that. I loved it, 1950’s bungalow style house, 2 car garage, small(30ft) barn and a bunch of sheds, nicely treed in.
looking through realtors right now, and spec wise the cheapest thing I can find around here similar to it is up for $389,000 but only has 10 acres.
Prices are/were cheap here because I’m like an hour and a half away from the city.
My 1980s era construction is valued at over 400k. Neighbors been selling recently for 450k-480k. It’s wild that they’ve doubled in cost since covid, after doubling in cost after the bank failures before them.
This post describes an upper-middle class cishet white dude, and that’s it.
Maybe a modern upper-middle class cishet white dude.
The point is that, back then, anyone literally could afford a Plymouth Roadrunner after working a summer job for a month or two.
Cars were somewhat cheaper back then, but they were also a lot shittier. Most odometers only had 5 digits because getting it to 100,000 miles was unusual.
Advances in body materials made it so that they no longer disintegrated into rust by the 1980’s, and advances in machine tolerances and factory procedures made it so that cars were routinely hitting 100,000 miles or more by the 1990’s.
A 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner MSRPed for $2,945, in an era when minimum wage was $1.60/hour. That’s 1840 hours worked at minimum wage (46 weeks of full time work), for a car that could probably drive about 100,000 miles, and required a lot more active maintenance.
Now that cars last longer, too, the used car market exists in a way that the 1960s didn’t have. That makes it possible to buy a used car more easily, and for the new cars being purchased to retain a bit more value when they’re sold a few years later.
And that’s to say nothing of fuel economy, where a Roadrunner was getting something like 11 miles per gallon, or safety, back when even medium speed crashes were deadly.
The basic effect, in the end, is that the typical household in 2025 is spending a lower percentage of their budget on transportation, compared to the typical household in 1970.
The golden age for being able to buy and use cheap cars was probably around 2015-2020, before the used car market went nuts.
Yes, it was easier for just anyone to buy a car. Now do the rest of the stuff in that post. None of it was accessible to someone who wasn’t a upper-middle class cishet white dude in the late 60s.
It’s a tad tougher these days even for them
I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying a lot of the things in the post were only accessible to people with privilege.
Being 20 in the US in 1969 and not getting drafted into Vietnam? Summer of 69 being more defined by Woodstock than the racial justice uprising that swept across black communities virtually every summer of the 60s (including 69)? Finding a woman who grew up in a super tiny town and her NOT being super racist against you? Getting a well-paying job with no qualifications? Not getting redlined out of being allowed to buy a decent house, let alone being allowed to buy 10 acres?
None of that was accessible to people of color, poor people, or women, let alone openly lgbtq people.
I think it’s also funny that edgelords who feel disenfranchised by the current system despite performing white patriarchy will usually hang around 4chan. Next post is probably how women and minorities being in positions of power is why they aren’t getting their dues.
If OP was 20 in the Summer of '69 then he most certainly was eligible to fight in a war.
Wasn’t it like 8.25% of eligible men were drafted? Which doesn’t include college deferments, “bone spur” avoidance, etc?
More than 9 out of 10 people didn’t get drafted. It certainly sucked for those who did, but the majority didn’t have to worry about war.
About 40% of that generation was in the military. 8% were drafted, but a lot of the 32% who voluntarily joined did so in order to exercise some control over where they ended up. Even those who didn’t serve, often had to deal with the overall risk hanging over their head, or were actively committing crimes to avoid the draft. The draft might have only directly affected 8%, but the threat of the draft, and people’s decisions around that issue, was a huge part of that generation’s lived experience.
It certainly sucked for those who did, but the majority didn’t have to worry about war.
It’s not like you knew; you were still fucking worried even if you were in the 9/10.
I would not have wanted to take my chances of being one of the 1/12. They not have had to worry once it was all over, but while it was happening a lot of people were at risk of being sent to die in a foreign land.
Oh yeah I get what you’re saying, and I’d agree cause I’m sure I’d have been picked (Although I guess we could probably look at the records and see if we would have been drafted based on our birthdays). It still doesn’t change the fact the economy was way better for everyone though.
I think Anon is making shit up, willing to bet he wasn’t born in 1949…
