• LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    Rivers on fire, gay bashing, satanic panic, abortion clinic bombings, acid rain…

    Shit was wild, and often not in a good way. 70s fashion was groovy, though.

    • 4am@lemmy.zip
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      6 days ago

      My town when I was growing up used to test the air raid sirens at noon on Saturday. Two 30 second runs, 5 seconds apart (so we’d know it was the test and not a real warning).

      I used to call it the “noon whistle” and it was how I knew to come in from playing in the yard for lunch.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Rivers on fire, gay bashing, satanic panic, abortion clinic bombings, acid rain…

      Okay, but we have all of that now, too. What was different?

      • CannonFodder@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        No - literally rivers were on fire.
        And gay bashing was mainstream, fully tolerated, very common. Lakes were turning clear like swimming pools due to acid rain - kinda pretty, but totally dead.

        • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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          5 minutes ago

          People seem to forget that GenX saw this shit and was like, no more. That’s what led to the current drive to fix this. But GenX doesn’t get credit for starting it – we’re grouped with boomers for some reason.

          • AA5B@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            Think of that but continuous. Sure there seems to be to be more environmental disasters than ever but each is a one off.

            • Dead lakes and crumbling masonry from acid rain were continuous. For years
            • BP having an oil spill eventually goes away, but rivers were toxic for decades, repeatedly starting on fire
            • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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              2 days ago

              The rivers of fire was one major thing that contributed to the formation of the EPA, actually. In the preceding decades, if was totally normal for industry to just dump whatever waste into rivers and nobody cared.

              We still have far too much pollution going on, but I feel many people have forgotten just how egregious it was before government regulations were put in place to stop shit like that.

              It’s pretty bad now, but more to the point, we’re still paying for the wanton destruction wrought decades ago. And now ‘conservatives’ (air quotes because in this case, it’s the opposite) want to roll back regulations because freedom.

              • AA5B@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                I’ve been through river cleanups everywhere I ve lived. There’s always something toxic that corps got away with dumping for so many years and then just left it. Government on the hook for so many billions of dollars cleaning up the mess. Where’s that sense of personal/corporate responsibility we hear so much about?

          • shalafi@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            You obviously weren’t around for the 1980s, and that’s OK! But don’t try to shoehorn current events into what we dealt with in the past.

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        You have got to be fucking kidding me. This is a snarky post, right? Not serious?