Agreed milani. I don't think OSHA was around, and to your point, nothing was going to interfere with the "war" Johnson escalated. I think Nixon was the one who ended it, finally, in the early 1970s - one of the things he got right.
Yeah, he wasn't all bad. Aside from being a paranoid crook, he was actually quite progressive in many ways. He created OSHA, as you say, and the EPA (I think he signed the executive orders on the same day), and was the last Republican president to significantly improve women's rights, native American rights, and civil rights.
He fought for a national minimum income (basically a reverse income tax) to help poor people care for their families, and universal health care. He was unable to get either one of those through Congress, but he did succeed in establishing SSI, and under his leadership, funding for Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare more than doubled.
The irony of Nixon is that if he were running for president today, he would be far too liberal for even the
Republican nomination.
And the
tragedy of Richard Nixon is that he just had no clear ethical principles. He could have done so much to make our country far greater than it is now. He could have been a truly great president had he just not given in to his weakest nature.
I wonder how many service men and women who manage to make it back from that hellhole were affected? The government certainly won't offer anything. Post-9/11 - police, firemen, and others present that horrible day (who then suffered from cancer and other ailments) were only reluctantly helped by the government. No good deed goes unpunished.
I don't know how current this is, but I do recall doing an article about Agent Orange some years ago, and that time the generally accepted figures were roughly 300,000 dead American vets, 400,000 Vietnamese civilians, and between 150,000 and 250,000 birth defects in Vietnamese children. Birth defects in areas of Vietnam where usage was heavy are still higher than average.
Sounds like we're about the same age. Yeah the Beatles were hot and the Packers were winning championships. The 60s was a very interesting decade to be a teenager.
I wouldn't trade growing up in the 60s for any other period of time, and I wouldn't trade growing up in rural north central Wisconsin for any other childhood. I could not possibly have picked a better time or better place. My wife was born and raised in New York 20 years after I was born, and she's just mesmerized by my stories.
We had a very small horse farm at the east end of a mile long dirt road, named Haymeadow Lane. The nearest neighbors were the Woijciks, who lived a mile west at the corner of Haymeadow and the paved north-south road. The nearest neighbor to the north was the Firkus farm, a mile directly north of us on the far side of the southernmost piece of the Dewey Marsh, and there was a mile of undeveloped forest of second- and third-growth pine all the way to the east before you hit someone's back yard.
So I lived smack dab in the geographical center of a 4-square mile block of forest, marshlands, meadow, and scrub pines. On a summer day, when my parents were at work, I was the only human being for a mile in
every direction. A four square mile of land with a population of one - for a population density of .25 humans per square mile (plus, of course, my dog, who honestly was one of the luckiest dogs in the history of dogs). I spent my entire day every single summer just prowling around the woods, hiking, exploring, riding my horse, studying plants, animals, birds, and geology, sitting on a bench reading a book (I sometimes took an axe and saw with me, and made benches out of small trees in especially cool spots. I had several of those in those 4 square miles).
And when my wife went through that same stretch of her life, she was living in Manhattan, with a population of almost 3,000,000 people in that same 4-square mile area. Every now and then, her parents would toss her into the back seat and trundle her off to Central Park, but at the same stage of my life, I was close to a mile from the nearest human being.
On average, the state of Alaska has roughly 6 times the population density as the 4-square miles around our house. Where is this even possible today? I really question where it
could be possible, at least in Wisconsin. I still can hardly believe how fortunate I was.
And Amy? She can't even
begin to comprehend it. Doesn't even know how or where to start unpacking that. Totally outside any frame of reference she can imagine. God, I was lucky... when I die, I almost don't care where I end up, because I've already lived in heaven.
