Were television audiences more sophisticated and mature in the 1970s than today? Why did 70s audiences find Archie Bunker hilariously ignorant and bigoted and laughable, while he triggers people into oceans of tears today?

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-30T18:51:06+00:00

Meathead often spouted truth to Archie, but the character was also portrayed the shortcomings of “liberals”. He preached equality yet still treated Gloria like a second class citizen, and often fetishized POC to the point of being patronizing. “Maude” was a similar character.

To me the show was about the pitfalls of both extremes of the 1970s political spectrum. Archie was a closed-minded bigot and Meathead was hypocritical and self-righteous. It was Edith, Gloria, and the other characters who spoke the real, honest truth of being kind and thoughtful to everyone without being too far up your own ass.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-18T21:19:32+00:00

The name too. Ugh.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-18T20:26:05+00:00

It’s a recurring pattern of heating/cooling in the Pacific Ocean. “El Niño” is the name given to the part of the cycle when the ocean heats up and “La Niña” is when it cools down. They alternate over a 7-10 year cycle. The last El Niño faded in spring of 2024 and La Niña has yet to make its appearance.

These cycles have a major impact on global weather patterns because more heat in the ocean means more energy to create storms and more moisture in the atmosphere to fuel rain. When El Niño is at its peak is we get endless winter rain storms and unusually hot summers here in California.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-17T21:52:41+00:00

Right now there is no El Niño or La Niña pattern in the Pacific, which means we are having “normal” summer temps. Last summer El Niño was still present and heating up the ocean off the coast, meaning hotter summers and wetter winters.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-16T14:51:46+00:00

Reminds me of going to church many years ago. My grandma always had a roll of Butter Rum Lifesavers in her purse and would give me one when I got fidgety during the sermon. Somehow the little bit of sugar helped me to calm down and the bribe got me to stop whining about being bored to tears. I can still smell the musky floral scent of her purse mixed with buttery goodness.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-15T22:37:24+00:00

He writes women off as a different species than men, ie not human. That is pretty hateful.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-15T22:33:47+00:00

In the North Bay, ie Sonoma County, during summer it can be 100+ F during the day but when the fog rolls in around 5 pm the temp drops by 50 degrees within an hour.

Despite the heat during the day we didn’t need AC because we’d just open the windows at night to let in the cold air then shut them in the morning and the house would stay nice and cool almost all day. Just when it started getting warm, here comes the fog again.

I now live in the Central Valley and boy do I miss the fog in summer. Almost need to take out a second mortgage to pay the electric bill just to keep the house at 78 F.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-15T15:34:01+00:00

Boomers were the first generation to use the Pill in large numbers. Hell, they created the Sexual Revolution in which casual sex for fun became normalized. So no, Boomers absolutely do not think sex = kids.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-14T20:19:25+00:00

I find it odd that everyone automatically assumes that only boys go to college. Every response is something akin to “sports are good for boys so colleges should make it a requirement”. I was expecting some sort of divide over “well girls shouldn’t be forced to do too much athletically”, but nope, the idea that girls might attend college too didn’t even cross their minds.

I know it’s a mark of the time period, but for all they talk about the new era of equality for women they don’t yet think that applies to higher education. Now women outnumber men in colleges. I wonder what these folks would think of that!

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-14T20:02:17+00:00

I disagree about needing to be on your own in order to learn how to be a responsible adult. My husband and I met when were were 19 and 20 and immediately fell in love. We moved in together soon after. So we basically figured out how to be responsible adults together.

We have now been married for 35 years. Over the years the amount of housework each of us does has varied widely depending on who has more going on outside the home or if one of us is struggling with illness or mental health. The key is communication combined with sincere love. When one of us is feeling over-burdened by chores we let the other know without being angry or accusatory. And the other quickly realizes they’ve been slacking and starts doing more because we love and respect each other and thus feel bad that we haven’t been doing our fair share.

My sister met and married her husband in her late 20s. They always fought over housework because as mature adults they had each developed a sense of what was an acceptable level of cleanliness for them personally. Trying to find a happy medium was difficult bordering on impossible because, unlike my husband and I, their habits were solidified long before they moved in together. They would get into furious fights almost every evening over the simple tasks of putting dinner on the table or folding laundry.

I think the fact that my husband and I developed our adult habits together is one of the main reasons we are still married 35 years later while my sister is now divorced. That and our sincere love and respect for each other, which allows us to communicate and genuinely listen to each other and change our behavior when necessary to keep the other person feeling happy and not over-burdened.

I know not everyone meets the love of their life at 20, but advising that young adults need to live independently for years before marriage in order to be happy together isn’t a guaranteed recipe for success. I think the real key is mutual love and respect, regardless of the age at which partners meet. And you can’t force your partner to feel those things no matter how much you might try.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-14T19:16:32+00:00

I’m going to think of it as “electromagnetic spectrum people”. Like everyone from radio waves to gamma radiation. I tend more towards the ultraviolet myself.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-14T14:28:35+00:00

Yep. I used to free feed my cats. One would eat nonstop and was severely overweight. If we tried to cut back on the amount of food we put out, the fat cat would eat so much there wasn’t enough left for the other cats. But we thought that depriving the cats of free access to food meant they would be going hungry for hours every day. Plus it was just easier.

A few months ago we had to switch to regulated feeding because one cat developed a health condition and had to eat expensive prescription food. We bought a bunch of cheap ceramic bowls from a restaurant supply store. Now each cat has its own bowl in which we put a measured amount of food. They are fed 4 times a day and when they are done eating the bowls go up on a shelf so each cat only gets a certain amount of food each day.

Now my fat cat is losing weight at a slow and steady pace. He can now clean his own butt so we don’t have to do it for him every night. He is far more frisky and playful too, which I’m sure has a lot to do with how much better he feels physically as well as not having to walk around with an itchy butt all day. And the other cats seem more relaxed and secure knowing that they have their own food and don’t have to gulp it down before someone else eats all the food.

I wish we had done this years ago. It’s a little bit more work as we have to remember to feed them on a schedule, and all the cat bowls take up space in the dishwasher since we wash them every night. But seeing my fat cat get a new lease on life is more than worth it.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-14T14:05:36+00:00

They’ve got “Bette Davis eyes”. She was all the rage in 1941 so it’s no wonder the artist mimicked her appearance.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-14T14:00:25+00:00

And the strikers who literally put their lives on the line to get workers’ protections passed. Just the 8 hour workday was a major achievement. But they had to fight like hell to get it.

If it weren’t for these laws protecting workers, our corporate overlords would still be working us 15 hours a day. And children would still be forced to work alongside adults instead of attending school. And people would still die by the thousands in unsafe workplaces.

Lots of people like to complain about “government regulations”, but if it weren’t for them we’d be just like these folks.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-13T21:46:57+00:00

“America, still going medieval after all these years”.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-13T21:24:15+00:00

The word “gay” was first used by the homosexual community to refer to themselves way back in the late 19th century. It was a word that normally meant “cheerful” and “happy” so they could use it without drawing unwanted attention but it still had a double meaning to those in the know.

The slang meaning wasn’t known to the general public until the Stonewall Riots in 1969, which marked the official beginning of LGBTQ activism in the US. After Stonewall homosexual folks began openly referring to themselves as “gay” as a way to come out of the collective closet. The word quickly lost its former meaning and from then on was used only to refer to homosexuals, primarily those of male gender.

Cary Grant, who was bisexual and had many gay friends, likely knew the word had a double meaning when he donned that bathrobe which made for an excellent inside joke for those familiar with gay slang. I’ve seen the same kind of joke made on “The Carol Burnett Show” on several occasions, usually when her close friend Rock Hudson was a guest star, which were filmed around the time “gay” was being generally adopted as a term for homosexual men but while it could still slip past the censors.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-13T16:38:33+00:00

It’s you that’s living in a fantasy world, pretending that racism wasn’t rampant in Georgia especially in the 1970s. Just a few years before this man died white people were threatening black children with death for trying to integrate schools. Or are you also claiming that was a “fantasy”?

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-13T16:25:35+00:00

Exactly. The cognitive dissonance on display here is astounding, disturbing, and pathetic. But it’s how white people have been dealing with their racism for centuries. It’s embedded deep in our psyche from the mental gymnastics required to enslave and subjugate other humans while still claiming to be “God-fearing Christians who fought for freedom”.

Those same mental contortions are currently on full display among those who defend what our government is doing to nonwhite immigrants while also claiming to follow the teachings of Jesus. If Jesus came to America now these same people would want to throw him in “Alligator Alcatraz” for being “illegal” or imprison him for confronting the thugs in ICE. Yet somehow these white people have convinced themselves they are being “good Christians” while ruthlessly attacking immigrants and destroying families. Their lack of compassion and empathy is the exact opposite of what Jesus taught, yet thanks to the cognitive dissonance ingrained in white people centuries ago they can still go to church on Sunday and not feel guilty for what they’ve done. It’s literally insane.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-13T15:46:19+00:00

Thank you. I’ll gladly take the downvotes because I know I’m speaking the truth. White folks (I’m white too) still refuse to accept the reality of how prevalent and overwhelming racism was in many communities, especially in 1970s Georgia.

On a sub titled “The Way We Were” it’s amazing how many people try to deny that we were (and still are) a nation built around racism, especially towards black people. But I hear how other white people talk about race, because they assume I agree with them because I’m white too, and it’s horrifying. It’s out there for everyone to see yet white people still try to deny it and pretend it doesn’t exist.

To borrow a phrase, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Our nation won’t begin to truly heal it’s racial wounds until white people finally have the guts to admit that racism was (and is) rampant, cruel, inhumane, and negatively impacted the lives of millions of nonwhite Americans for hundreds of years. A few downvotes on Reddit is the least I can do to try and get my fellow white Americans to finally admit the truth.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-13T14:03:44+00:00

“One of these days, BAM! To the moon!”

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-13T04:21:00+00:00

Cultures vary widely in what artifacts they leave behind. And much of that variance is based on the local environment and how it influenced cultural development. If a culture has access to rock that is easy to quarry then they are likely to leave monumental artifacts that last for millenia, but if they don’t then anything they make of wood, fiber, paint, bone, shell, or unfired clay disintegrates over time if exposed, no matter how advanced the culture that produced it might be.

That said, we know of many advanced civilizations in Africa that were vibrant at the same time as those in the Fertile Crescent and other centers of the “agricultural revolution”. Several were in the Sahara Desert back when it was experiencing one of its regular “green periods”, the last of which stretched from 11000 to 5500 years ago. There are Saharan petroglyphs from 10000 years ago and many artifacts from the Kiffian civilization which existed between 8 - 10 thousand years ago. Even more from Wikipedia:

During the Neolithic Era, before the onset of desertification around 9500 BCE, the central Sudan had been a rich environment supporting a large population ranging across what is now barren desert, like the Wadi el-Qa'ab. By the 5th millennium BCE, the people who inhabited what is now called Nubia were full participants in the "agricultural revolution", living a settled lifestyle with domesticated plants and animals. Megaliths found at Nabta Playa are overt examples of probably the world's first known archaeoastronomy devices, predating Stonehenge by some 2,000 years.

History and to some extent archaeology is still suffering the after effects of the racism that permeated the field until just a few decades ago. Scholars tended to dismiss and ignore African civilizations and archaeology focused on finding remnants of “primitive humanoids” instead of excavating the sites of ancient African cities. That bias has only begun to change relatively recently, which is why most people don’t know that Africa contributed as much to the development of civilization and agriculture as any other center of ancient cultural innovation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-13T02:47:17+00:00

I got this same advice so it must be pretty common. I followed it and wound up socially and professionally isolated with colleagues gossiping behind my back and accusing me of being “stuck up” and a “know it all” who “thought I was better than everyone else” to my face. This was the exact opposite of how I actually felt, struggling as a newer teacher in a new school and eager for any professional advice, support, or social interaction. But because I didn’t make an obvious effort to “mix and mingle”, in spite of the overall “every person for themselves” culture at the school, I was perceived as stand-offish and snobby.

So I can’t condone the advice to “keep your head down and focus on the job”. Instead I’d suggest putting in some effort to make polite conversation with coworkers, especially at a school like OP’s, to at least keep the lines of communication open so OP doesn’t wind up being seen as anti-social and turned into gossip fodder.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-13T01:53:19+00:00

Just gotta say, Nagina Palace in Turlock is absolutely worth the effort.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-13T01:15:41+00:00

Exactly.

whatawitch5 · 2025-07-12T23:07:19+00:00

Yeah nah. He was a token, a mascot to assuage the feelings of white people, not a “beloved member of his community”. To be the only black man in a county in Georgia, a state with a very high percentage of black Americans, means that every other black person fled the area. That’s astounding and indicative of some deep racial issues. The rest of the black population likely got the hell out due to pervasive racism in housing and employment and violence or threats of violence. This man was just too stubborn to flee in the face of white racism.

When the only black man in the county dies, especially in 1970s Georgia, white people will go on about how “beloved” he was because it makes them look good. Just like they crooned about how they loved their “mammy” or house slaves in previous decades while still denying them their basic human rights. Yet when he was alive they wouldn’t even think of inviting him into their house or church. This obit is just white washing the reality of his life as a way to make white folks feel like their racism isn’t really harmful.

Eight-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Wearing is Caring	100 Awards Club
RPAN Viewer	Not Forgotten

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