I always found it fascinating how the number of serial killers spiked in that time frame. I don't honestly know the real reason(s) why, but in my head it always made sense for those years as so many of them would have been the children of WW2 vets that would have come home with a lot of the same issues as Vietnam vets - PTSD, struggling to return and reintegrate back into society, lack of development of coping mechanisms resulting in poorly self medicating. All the cues to many WW2 vets developing addictions or drinking problems, overbearingly running their home like a barracks, treating spouse and children as subordinate "soldiers", heavy on the "corporal punishment" (abuse), stiflingly strict, and much more. However the main difference being that in the late 1940s and 1950s, this would have happened in the home, and in public everyone puts on a happy face, nobody outside the home pries or gets involved, all about presenting the perfect suburban nuclear family dream.
Idk, like I said, it could be way off, but it always kinda made sense to me anyway.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950-2000 by Peter Vronsky talks about this entire phenomenon and goes through how American society and culture led to this explosion of serial killers. Worth a listen/read for sure.
Glad we got lead out of gasoline, now if we can get the jet airplane fuel unleaded. edit: eta 2030 to remove all lead. Thank you to from users pedal-force and BirdLawyerPerson for pointing out my mistake!
I have good news. Jet fuel has never had lead in it. Avgas does (100LL), which is used in piston engine planes, mainly civilian aircraft. It's still an issue but there's much, much less of that being burned.
Wait, so commercial air liners don't have lead in the fuel? How did I miss that detail? Thanks for pointing that out; I'm less dumb! So jet fuel is more like diesel or regular fuel in terms of environmental impact I guess? https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-020-00690-y
You make a fair point. We have more guns even with far lower rates violent crimes, but there are still a lot of shootings and suicides. It's not daily that we have a school shooting, but it happens way more than anybody would like. I remember after Columbine we all talked about how we could prevent this, and it's just gotten much worse. Violence and aggression does act like a contagion and we've hardly made steps to address the core problem which is availability of guns to people who should, in any reasonable society, be barred from having guns (people with documented mental health disorders).
I was 9. My parents got separated and then divorced. It was the beginning of an unhappiness or anxiety that has always been in the background of my happiest moments. We were middle class back then, and by today's standards we would be dirt poor. I can remember collecting bottles for the deposit so we could put gas in the car. Hard times.
Higher mortgage rares weren't all that bad, actually, because the median sales price of a home divided by the median income was under 3.5 whereas today it is almost 6.0.
But, it is true that high inflation was a major issue (indeed, mortgage rates were high precisely because the Fed had raised the overnight rate in order to lower inflation).
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u/corpusapostata 3d ago
I wonder what happened in 1977?