A retrospective look meant to counter hindsight bias pertaining to the Bicentennial era, presented in the manner of Leonard Michaels (“I Would Have Saved Them If I Could”; “The Men’s Club”) and his short story “In the Fifties.“

In the seventies, my family moved to Minnesota from Vermont. I also started school that same year. That was the year everything changed for the worse. I attended six different elementary schools: two red-brick bastions of stale white bread conformity, three inner-city schools, and one school overseas.

In the seventies, I spent whole days exploring wooded and riverine areas, skating and sledding in the winter, riding my bike around the parkways and lakes ringing Minneapolis, or at the beach, where I would swim as far out as I could without the lifeguards getting mad. Given that my family put the “diss” in dysfunctional, being a free-range kid saved my sanity.

In the seventies, my mother commandeered the TV set during the summer of 1973 to watch the Watergate hearings when my brother and I wanted to watch cartoons and situation comedy reruns. We didn’t understand exactly what Nixon had done, but being deprived of entertainment gave us a tangible reason to hate him.

Because home delivery of the Sunday New York Times was not yet an option in the seventies, some of my fonder childhood memories are of going to a suburban news outlet after Sunday school at the First Unitarian Society, where my brother and I would browse the comic books and paperbacks until our mother pried us out of there or the store manager shooed us out.

Because of the 1973 and 1979 energy crises, gas tripled in price during the seventies.

The price of nearly everything increased. I look back wistfully now at my mother maintaining that Big John Baked Beans were too expensive at forty-nine cents a can.

Racist, sexist, ethnocentric and homophobic jokes became less acceptable during the seventies but were still very much a part of the culture.

Corporal punishment and shaming (especially body shaming) were regarded as acceptable parenting methods in the seventies.

In 1973, the American Psychological Association stopped categorizing homosexuality as a mental illness. However, therapists and clinicians wasted no time finding other ways of pathologizing difference. Oppositional defiant disorder, anyone?

The 1970s also saw the rise of the so-called New Right (many of them old-time reactionaries in new clothing), the growth of megachurches and increasing political clout of the religious right, exemplified by Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell.

Every other news cycle seemed to yield new scarehead articles and more unsettling stories: Killer bees, encephalitis-bearing mosquitoes, the Glensheen Mansion murders, Son of Sam, the Church Committee revelations concerning the FBI and CIA’s misdeeds; to name just a few.

Last but not least, nostalgia became a mass phenomenon in the 1970s with K-Tel’s compilation albums of bygone musical hits, movies like American Graffiti, and TV shows such as “Happy Days” which painted a picture of 1950s in roseate colors for all those yearning for a simpler place and time, or imbued with selective memories. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

We’ll get straight to the point: The financial hardships that Daily Kos is facing this year are tough.

We continue to be paywall-free. We continue to be supported by our readers, not billionaires or corporations. But we need to bring in more revenue. We are leaning on our community more than ever to help make ends meet.