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Editorial
1950s most popular decade for time travelers
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Where were you in '62?
Not all of us can answer that question, posed in the promotion for the classic film, "American Graffiti" -- we didn't exist -- but if we're like 15 percent of the people who responded to a poll released by the Economist on Tuesday, we would most like to return to the decade of the 1960s.
Asked "Which decade of the 20th century would you most like to go back to?", most people -- 18 percent -- said they would like to return to the 1950s.
Thirty-five percent of people age 45 to 64 chose the '50s, nearly 20 percent of people 18-20 would like to return to the 1920s or 1990s, and about 20 percent of people age 45 t0 54 would like to go back to the 1980s.
Surprisingly, although the 1990s were the most prosperous decade in recent years, and we even had a balanced federal budget, most people had no desire to go back 20 years.
We can think of numerous reasons, pro and con, to return to various decades in Southwest Nebraska's past.
The early 1900s certainly would have been an exciting time to live here to witness the transformation of McCook from a frontier railroad town to a modern city.
The 1920s would have been "roaring" here, perhaps in a subdued way compared to big cities, but not many who lived through the Depression years would choose to revisit the Dust Bowl.
Little could match the excitement of the establishment of an Army Air Base in the 1940s and the effort to make troops on trains feel appreciated during stops here, but that would be tempered with the disruption in young lives and the sacrifice of families who saw young men go off to war, never to return.
Construction of reservoirs for irrigation and flood countrol would be another exciting time, full of promise, but the turmoil and sacrifice, again, associated with the war in Vietnam might well be left behind, as would the farm crisis of the 1980s.
Read the original Economist article, and view a chart of the poll results at http://econ.st/185FVcq