The '50's are Over, People.

See the picture? It's great. They look really happy. Really. There's Dad, with well-kept hair, dressed in a tux at home, because that's what people do, of course, and Mom, in her excessively modest top backed by her blonde, White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) daughter in a sun dress, and a boy that looks innocent, beaming with potential. Everything is black and white, because things were black and white back then--it was too perfect for color. The facade of jubilation is rock solid. Those who lived it romanticize the time they spent therein, those who didn't are led to believe that it was a time of rainbows, lolly-pops and daisies. While I have no idea whether or not these assertions are true, I can tell you with certitude, unlike Anthony Weiner, that those times are, indeed, over and we Americans have to step up and face that reality.

I'm not going to argue that the fifties weren't great. The American standard of living was the highest in the world, the G.I. Bill of Rights brought college education to men everywhere, women stayed in the kitchen and everybody stuck strictly to the straight-and-narrow-minded. Milkshakes and drive in movies highlighted existence, and all-American girls were to be found on every street corner--for free! Certainly, it bears little resemblance to America today (with the exception of isolated suburban communities that shut the rest of us out). I mean, look at this show that literally DEFINES a modern family: it's comprised of an inter-racial couple with a significant age gap, an overweight child, a less-than-upstanding child and a homosexual couple that defies God's golden glory by adopting a baby so they, too could be parents. It's awful!

But in all seriousness, there was an explosion of economic boom, perpetuated by oppression abroad but hey, it worked and great nations had been doing so for thousands of years. Americans are constantly searching for 'the next big thing' that will bring about economic boom, expansion and economic prosperity. Indeed, the American dream is no longer to strike it big as an entrepreneur, but rather to live on a stable upper-middle echelon paycheck in the secluded suburbs as an accountant. This is because Americans are no longer the trailblazers and pioneers they used to be, no more than a neutered chihuahua is a wolf. Yet they still expect to feast like a wolf, regardless of personal output or economic climate. We as a people believe that we all deserve plasma screen TV's, that we are endowed with the right to own one by our creator, the same one our forefather's thought only granted us life. This culture of consumerism and laziness can be traced directly back to the 1950's and the ideal so many still expect to find on a single income, with a modest education and no risk whatsoever.

I don't really care what we do next, as long as Americans realize that we'll either have to abolish a minimum wage to bring industry back to America and, as a side effect, yield a fat cat upper class crushing (under their enormous obesity) an impoverish poor with wages significantly worse than the "five dollars a day" first introduced by Ford in Detroit, or else we all resign to be like Europeans, living in relative economic prosperity and isolation, but without really bothering with the international superpower thing. I'd be cool working as an oppressed underclassman or commuting every day by high speed rail, whichever people deem better, just as long as we stop living with the mentality that every single person can earn a house with a lawn in the quaint suburbs and a flat screen TV. Grow some balls, America, and live like the Irish did in the 1850's or else like the Europeans do now, but the prosperity of the 1950's does not define a culture permanently any more than Caesar's manly conquests defined the empire as a whole four hundred years later.