Authored by Steve Candidus via The Burning Platform blog,

LLPOH wrote a most interesting article about how Europe has changed so much in his most recent visit to the way it was years ago that it got me to thinking about how America has changed. Specifically, what would happen if I were able to visit the America that I grew up in, in the 1950s and 1960s.

I was perusing some old videos on YouTube and came upon a set of videos about the New York World’s Fair of 1964 and 1965. I was twelve years old and living on Long Island at the time and I visited the fair at least a dozen or more times in its two years of existence.

The World’s Fair video that I found the most interesting was a copy of an NBC documentary hosted by the late Edwin Newman that for YouTube posting was done in six parts. Its original showing on NBC in 1964 was just a single one-hour program.

Edwin Newman got quite a bit of criticism in the YouTube comments for being such a downer and a stick-in-the-mud, but the fact that he wasn’t hyping the fair like all of the other videos that I found is the reason that I found it the most useful to my purpose.

I watched these videos of thousands of people all rushing into and mingling at that fair without a single confrontation among them and asked myself if that would be possible in today’s America. There were long lines to get into the fair, lines at the pavilions, lines at the food courts (identified by the multi-bubble balloon looking things on top), people rushing together under cover when it rained, and everyone was pleasant to each other and very well mannered. Newman even commented on it at the nine minute mark in part four of the YouTube listing.

The first time or two that I went to the 64-65 NY World’s Fair was with my family. All of the rest of times I went with friends. Somebody’s mom or dad would drop us off early in the morning at the train station – The Long Island Railroad (LIRR) – and we would take the train to the Woodside Station and then head upstairs to get the EL (Elevated Line).

Since we were just kids and never had much money, we figured out quickly that rather than take the LIRR to the Jamaica Station and waiting for the LIRR train to take us the rest of the way to the fair it was faster and cheaper to go to Woodside and pick up the EL. It was only ten or fifteen cents. Much cheaper and faster than the LIRR.

Whether it was just my best friend Donnie and I or whether we had a station wagon load of friends, we would go off to the fair on our own, spend the whole day, even to the fireworks at night before heading home tired and foot weary without every worrying about our safety.

After getting back to Baldwin Station we would call somebody’s dad (we had to save ten cents for the phone call) to come and pick us up. Fortunately just about everybody’s mom or dad had a station wagon. Sometimes we filled it.

When I look through videos of fairs and events or Disney World videos today I find fistfights, muggings, pickpockets, assaults of all sorts captured and posted by bystanders. I also see people almost morbidly obese as the norm. I didn’t see any of those things in the old 64-65 World’s Fair footage and don???t remember seeing any of it in my visits.

It’s not just Europe that has changed. The world has changed, and not all for the better. We have so many wonderful new inventions and luxuries, but people have devolved towards a kind of barbarism towards each other. If we were to visit a fair such as the one in 1964-1965 today we would be gate-raped by the blue-gloved perverts on the way in, subjected to every humiliation, and be fearful of rape, robbery, muggings, and beatings. Twelve year olds probably wouldn’t even be safe to take the train alone today before they even got to the fair.

How did this happen? When and why did we as a people change? Where are we headed?