My husband and I have been re-watching “The Wonder Years.” The show was a weekly date for us starting in 1988, but the story began in 1968. It takes the main character and his friends from 7th grade through high school, and if you ever want to know what is was like to grow up during those years, watch this show. It brings back a lot of memories for me.
Like now, the late 1960’s and early 1970’s were turbulent times, and the show lets you know it in both bold and subtle ways. The parents have the news turned on in a lot of scenes, and you hear about how many soldiers were killed in Vietnam each day. It is much like the COVID reports now. In some scenes, you can hear the news in the background covering The Soviet Union and the nuclear arms race. I grew up hearing about “the button,” and I was always scared that someone would accidentally push it and start a nuclear war. The show covers some of the race relation problems during that time. Unfortunately, war and race riots have not gone away in current times, but a lot of people have changed their attitudes for the better. Today’s news just doesn’t talk about those people, and today’s media is not as unbiased as the media used to be. I miss Walter Cronkite.
Still, growing up in those turbulent times was not all bad, and looking back, people younger than me cannot imagine what it was like. Often there was only one phone in the house, and it was attached to a wall. There was no privacy. The family in the show had to wait to buy a colored TV because when they first came out, they were too expensive. I remember being jealous of other families because they got one way before we did. The dad in the show worked hard and often came home grumpy. My dad was nowhere near grumpy, but he worked two jobs so that my mom could stay home with us kids. The mom in the show didn’t get a job until later episodes. My mother also worked in her later years of raising children. The hippy teenage daughter in the show wore clothes just like ones I longed to wear, but I was not quite old enough. They sat down to family dinner every night after the kids played outside till dark. I was lucky enough to be able to do that, and my mom was a good cook. The dad grumbled about the price of a Christmas tree, and my dad was known for buying us the “Charlie Browniest” of trees.
If anything, watching this show reminds me of all that my generation has faced and, for the most part, survived. It gives me hope that younger generations will come out of today’s problems stronger and wiser. No matter how bad things get, there is still good in this world. We need to remember that. We need to cherish it. We need to promote it. That is how humanity survives.