41 : Bush on Bush

                             words....

 

Congratulations to my brilliant daughter (I am sorry, but I must shamelessly brag)!

14 Nov 2014
It's one thing to get straight A's in America.  With grade inflation, many kids do.
It's quite another to get straight A's (and several A*'s (A+'s)) in a much more harshly-graded British school system (the Cambridge IGCSE curriculum).
But to get straight A's not only in a more rigorous system that does not engage in grade inflation, but to have externally monitored graders at Cambridge University in England, where Isaac Newton studied and taught, award her straight A's is an extraordinary accomplishment indeed!
And that is EXACTLY what Isabella did!

Congratulations to our brilliant daughter!  (Now don't feel any pressure from here on out!)

My Favorite Republican Quotations of All Time

I know I am hard on Republicans sometimes.  Well, just about all the time, unless you got back to Teddy Roosevelt or Abe Lincoln.  You know, when Republicans used to be both progressive and supportive of African Americans. 
So I would like to share some of my favorite Republican quotations.  Just to remind us what is at stake this election. 

"The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America.” Welfare is a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war... the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties."  Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”
 - Fred Koch, father of David Koch, as a founding member of the John Birch Society, 1963



"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N***er, n***er, n***er.' By 1968 you can’t say “n***er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N***er, n***er."
 - Lee Atwater explaining the Republican's Southern Strategy, 1981


"Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do."
 - Ronald Reagan, August, 1980

Nelson Mandela's ANC uses "terrorist tactics" and "proclaims a goal of creating a communist state."
 - President Ronald Reagan in a July, 1986 speech to the World Affairs Council

Nelson Mandela is a "terrorist train-bomber."
 - Pat Buchanan, President Reagan's speech-writer

Apartheid "is the one foreign policy debate that the Left can get involved in and feel that they have the moral high ground," but South Africa is a "complicated situation."
 - Grover Norquist criticizing anti-Apartheid activists, during a 1986 visit to South Africa promoted by white business leaders

South Africa is a "Christian country" because of its abortion policy; American companies should engage in "reinvestment" and buy Kruggerand coins to help boost the South African economy.
 - Jerry Falwell following a 1985 visit to the Apartheid regime

Advocates of sanctions against apartheid South Africa are "allies of those who favor a one-party Marxist Government in South Africa."
 - Pat Robertson, 1988

"I know we don't like apartheid, but the blacks in South Africa, in Soweto, don't have it all that bad."
 - Pat Robertson, 1993 

“The ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization. I don’t have any problem at all with the vote I cast 20 years ago."
 - Dick Cheney expressing no regrets on the 1986 vote he cast against a Congressional motion urging the release of Nelson Mandela from prison by the white South African government

"In England, if a criminal carried a gun, even though he didn't use it, he was tried for first-degree murder and hung if he was found guilty."
 - Ronald Reagan, April, 1982.  The claim is not only completely untrue, it's grammatically incorrect (people are hanged, not hung).

"I served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps."
 - Ronald Reagan, November 1983, to visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.  He repeated the story to Simon Wiesenthal in February, 1984.  "Reagan never visited or filmed a concentration camp; he spent World War II in Hollywood, making training films with the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps."  (source)

"In spite of the wildly speculative and false stories of arms for hostages and alleged ransom payments, we did not—repeat, did not— trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we."
  - Ronald Reagan, denying the Iran-Contra Affair, November 1986
"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's  true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not."
 - Ronald Reagan, admitting that he lied about the Iran-Contra Affair, March 1987

If elected, "the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and I'll say to them, 'Read my lips: no new taxes.'"
 - George H.W. Bush, August 18, 1988.  He was elected and he raised taxes in 1991 to fill the massive deficit created by Reagan's tax cuts.



"Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day."
   - Ron Paul, February 1990



"Rarely is the question asked, Is our children learning?"
 - W


"I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war."
 - George W. Bush falsely claiming in January, 2002, in West Virginia, that he served in Vietnam.  He avoided military service and while in the Texas Air National Guard checked the box requesting not to be deployed overseas if eligible.

"You teach your child to read and he or her will pass a literacy test."
  George W. Bush


"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
 - George W. Bush, 2003.  The CIA and British intelligence services both clarified that the British government had learned no such thing.

"We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job. "
  George W. Bush 9/21/05

"Laura and I really don't realize how bright our children is sometimes until we did an objective analysis."
"My education message will resignate among all parents."
  George W. Bush   New York Post, 1/19/2000

"These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans. Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money."
 - George W. Bush, touting his tax cuts for the rich in January, 2003.  The actual benefit to middle class Americans was only $217.


I do not believe we've put a guilty - I mean, innocent person to death in the state of Texas.
  George W. Bush  All Things Considered, NPR, June 16, 2000 [Miller, 243] Note that Bush was never known to have spent more than half an hour on any matter, death penalty appeals included.

Please… don't kill me!
  George W. Bush mocking what Karla Faye Tucker said, when asked, just before her execution, "What would you say to Governor Bush?", Talk, 9/99



JERRY FALWELL:  The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this [the 9-11 attacks] because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."
PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur.


AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.
  - Jerry Falwell

If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being.
 - Jerry Falwell

More W

"I believe that the human being and the fish can coexist.  Peacefully."
 - W

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
 - George W. Bush 8/6/04

"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country."
 - W

"Mission Accomplished"
 - W via an enormous banner that he had nothing to do with erecting when he gave a speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln in which he claimed "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

"We found the weapons of mass destruction."
 - George W. Bush falsely claiming in May, 2003, that WMD had been found in Iraq.  None ever have been.

"The only [Katrina victims] we're seeing on television are the scumbags."
  Glenn Beck, "The Glenn Beck Program," Sept. 9, 2005

Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. 
- George W. Bush to FEMA Director Michael Brown

"When I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I'm just like, 'Oh shut up' I'm so sick of them because they're always complaining."
  - Glenn Beck, 9/9/05

"Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization...And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did. That's what Al Gore, the U.N., and everybody on the global warming bandwagon [are doing]."
  - Glenn Beck, 5/1/07



"Well, let's see. There's -- of course -- in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings."
    --Sarah Palin, unable to name a Supreme Court decision other than
         Roe vs. Wade, interview with Katie Couric, CBS News, Oct. 1, 2008

"All of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me over all these years." --Sarah Palin, unable to name a single newspaper or magazine she reads, interview with Katie Couric, CBS News, Oct. 1, 2008

"My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars... Never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”
 - Sarah Palin "clarifying" her confusion about Africa being a continent not a country


"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
 - Sarah Palin on why she opposes the Affordable Care Act

As long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail.
  - Frank Lutz, Republican strategist, emphasizing the importance of creating an appearance of doubt in the scientific community to kneecap any climate legislation, in 2002.


" I believe our federal government has lost its way.  We need a leader who will stand and fight against an administration that is promoting central planning and a larger government at the expense of future generations."
  - Michael Pompeo (R-KS) accusing the president of Marxist central planning, 2009

"“It is time for the President to quit playing the game of blaming the former administration and to lead."
  - Michael Pompeo (R-KS), 2009



“Our opponent [then Senator Obama] voted to cut off funding for our troops.  He did this even after saying that he wouldn’t do such a thing. And he said, too, that our troops in Afghanistan are just, quote, ‘air-raiding villages and killing civilians.’ I hope Americans know that is not what our brave men and women are doing in Afghanistan.”
 - Sarah Palin at a campaign stop in 2008 where men booed and cried out "TREASON!"

 "So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research. ... Eugenics. In case you don't know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. ... The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening."
 - Glenn Beck, 3/9/09


I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop.  Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution, and it was designed to eat the Constitution, to progress past the Constitution.
The most used phrase in my administration if I were to be President would be "What the hell you mean we're out of missiles?"
What we don't have a right to is healthcare, housing, or handouts. We don't have those rights.
  - Glenn Beck

"Obama's got a health care logo that's right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook ... Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate."
 - Rush Limbaugh, Aug. 6, 2009

"I'm a huge supporter of women. What I'm not is a supporter of liberalism. Feminism is what I oppose. Feminism has led women astray. I love the women's movement — especially when walking behind it."
 - Rush Limbaugh, 2/3/10



"[Obama] wouldn't have been voted president if he weren't black. Somebody asked me over the weekend why does somebody earn a lot of money have a lot of money, because she's black. It was Oprah. No, it can't be. Yes, it is. There’s a lot of guilt out there, show we're not racists, we'll make this person wealthy and big and famous and so forth.... If Obama weren't black he'd be a tour guide in Honolulu or he'd be teaching Saul Alinsky constitutional law or lecturing on it in Chicago."
 - Rush Limbaugh, July 6, 2010


"Ms. Sotomayor and President Obama believe the job of a judge is to make policy, not interpret the law.  It is for this reason that I am raising my voice today to call for the rejection of Sotomayor’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court."
    - Michael Pompeo (R-KS)

"Instead of responding [to the Boston Marathon bombing], silence has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts, and more importantly still, in those that may well follow... the silence in the face of extremism coming from the best funded Islamic advocacy organizations and many mosques across America is deafening.”
    - Michael Pompeo (R-KS) - in fact, dozens of Muslim organizations had spoken up in condemnation of the attack.

“Look, we saw in Britain, Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, ‘Accept the Nazis. Yes, they’ll dominate the continent of Europe but that’s not our problem. Let’s appease them. Why? Because it can’t be done. We can’t possibly stand against them.'”
 - Ted Cruz comparing healthcare reform to the Nazis

"This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture....I'm not saying he doesn't like white people, I'm saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist."
 - Glenn Beck while employed by Fox News

“And nobody yet has, nobody yet has explained to the American public what they know, and surely they know more than the rest of us know who it is who will be taking the place of Mubarak and no, not, not real enthused about what it is that that’s being done on a national level and from D.C. in regards to understanding all the situation there in Egypt. And, in these areas that are so volatile right now, because obviously it’s not just Egypt but the other countries too where we are seeing uprisings, we know that now more than ever, we need strength and sound mind there in the White House. We need to know what it is that America stands for so we know who it is that America will stand with. And, we do not have all that information yet.”
 - Sarah Palin, February, 2011 - $1 to anyone who can tell me what the hell this means...



"Look, the wheels are coming off this (healthcare reform).  The Teamsters are abandoning it. President Obama just granted all of Congress an exception. And he did it because Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats who passed this thing came begging and said, ‘Please, please, please let us out of Obamacare.’ This thing ain't working."
  - Ted Cruz, Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, on Aug. 10, 2013.  Politifact rated this statement false.

President Obama is “the most radical President ever to occupy the Oval Office,” and had hidden from voters a secret agenda - “the government taking over our economy and our lives... Victory, or death!”
  - Ted Cruz speaking at a Koch Brothers funded event in 2010; As the crowd rose to its feet and cheered, he quoted the defiant words of a Texan at the Alamo.      

"Baby Killer!"  - Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), member of the Tea Party Caucus, shouting at Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) as he spoke on the House floor during the health care vote.

"I'm tired of some people calling me wacky."
  Sharron Angle, March 21, 2010



"I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be someone's fault instead of the fact that sometimes accidents happen."
  Kentucky GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul, May 21, 2010 talking about the BP oil spill and how unreasonably hard on the company President Obama was being

"If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."
  Nevada GOP Senate nominee and Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle, floating the possibility of armed insurrection, interview with right-wing talk radio host Lars Larson in Portland, OR, January 2010


"We took the Bible and prayer out of public schools, and now we're having weekly shootings practically. We had the 60s sexual revolution, and now people are dying of AIDS."
  Christine O'Donnell, during a 1998 appearance on Bill Maher's 'Politically Incorrect'"

"What does it say about the college co-ed [Sandra] Fluke who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex -- what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex."
 -Rush Limbaugh, referring to a Georgetown Law School student who was denied the right to speak at a congressional hearing on contraception, in which she planned to discuss a friend of hers who needed contraception to prevent the growth of cysts, February 29, 2012 

"A Georgetown coed told Nancy Pelosi's hearing that the women in her law school program are having so much sex they're going broke, so you and I should have to pay for their birth control. So what would you call that? I called it what it is. So, I'm offering a compromise today: I will buy all of the women at Georgetown University as much aspirin to put between their knees as they want. ... So Miss Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here's the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch."
  -Rush Limbaugh, March 1, 2012

"Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society."
 - Rush Limbaugh

“[P]roviding—providing fairness to the American people, under Obamacare, is—all we’re asking for. My goodness. They give big businesses a waiver. They give all these unions a waiver. And yet they’re forcing the American people to buy a product, buy a product that they do not want and cannot afford.”
 - John Boehner October, 2013, explaining why his party shut down the government. 



“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”
  — Mitt Romney, January 2012

”As president, I will create 12 million new jobs.”
  — Mitt Romney, Second presidential debate

”Government does not create jobs. Government does not create jobs.”
  — Mitt Romney, same debate, 45 minutes later (Oct. 16, 2012)


”Some girls rape easy.”
 – Roger Rivard (R-WI), October 2012

”I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”
 – Richard Mourdock (R-IN) October 2012



“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways of shutting that whole thing down”
 - Todd Aiken, R-MO

47%
"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what… These are people who pay no income tax... [M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
 - Mitt Romney, 2012


“We need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work — and by that I mean armed security.”
“If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy.”
 - Wayne LaPierre, NRA CEO, December 21 and 23, 2012

"We’ve got a humanitarian crisis on the border, and that has to be dealt with. But the president clearly isn’t going to deal with it on his own, even though he has the authority to deal with it on his own."
 - John Boehner, July, 2014, criticizing the president for not taking presidential action on immigration after Congress failed to take action.  As an aside, Boehner is suing the president for abuse of executive power.

Science is not a liberal conspiracy

But is science simply a revealing of the wonders of god's creation?  
Well, if one believes in a god or gods that created everything, then by definition those gods should get credit for all the good and bad things we see in the world, so in a circular sort of way, one's faith could be reinforced by the wonders of science as they are now revealed in our secular age. 
But the problem with this is that it assumes a partnership between religion and science which certainly was not there for much of European Christianity. From the burning of scrolls and later books on the writings of antiquity (which were seen as pre-Christian and therefore pagan) to the persecution of Galileo and the insistence on teaching creationism and abstinence-only education in the place of science today, Christianity has mainly come kicking and screaming into the scientific age. It is a sad indictment that Christian Europe for about a thousand years knew less about the planet - its shape and size and relationship to the sun - than did pre-Christian Greeks. The real flourishing of science did not occur until the Enlightenment, which was a secular (or at least deist) movement hostile to religious mumpsimus. 
One of the founding myths of Judaism and Christianity - the original sin for which women have to suffer labor pangs and men must work, and for which some Christians began to believe Jesus had died in atonement - involves a hostility to knowledge and curiosity. Adam and Eve were not punished for mass murder, gang rape, or torture, but for an illicit fruit-picking expedition (helped by a talking snake). Was it any coincidence that they were happier when they were ignorant, and what does this tell us about the Jewish and Christian relationship to empiricism and exploration of the world as we find it (as opposed to obedient, unquestioning acceptance of religious authority)?
Finally, the sacred texts of Judaism then Christianity had the opportunity to educate the world to the wonders of science and math but either chose not to or were simply incapable of it (the biblical authors were far less educated about scientific and mathematical matters than many of their colleagues in antiquity). This of course badly undercuts the argument that an omniscient god was either literally writing or at least being channeled by these authors, since such a god surely would have known about the shape of our planet, the wonders of light transmission, and genetics (which makes a mockery of the exclusively male family inheritance chains given in the bible (where Abraham begot Isaac, etc.) since a child inherits 50% of genes from each parent, who are therefore equally important, however Jewish and Christian societies demeaned women). Why would such a god hold back on stories that could have amazed, instead telling much smaller ones that he must have known (being omniscient) we would discover were nonsensically false with time? 
As Carl Sagan put it best, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."

What would have been truly "amazing" in the bible...

Here is what would have impressed me in the bible: a formula for cement. The Romans invented it, Christian Europe unlearned it for a millennium. The arch (ditto). Mention in even metaphorical form of DNA, inheritance, evolution, the relationship between mass and speed and time (far more mind blowing than burning bushes), mitochondrial DNA inherited from those nameless biblical females (and only the females), a spherical earth, a heliocentric solar system, an approximation of the speed of light (out at least an understanding that the sun is necessary to generate light, something the genesis authors apparently did not know), the emptiness and vastness of space (and therefore the special place of our life supporting planet). Insects with the correct number of legs, animals not known to biblical authors, pi, zero, decimal points, algebra, logarithms, the normal and power distributions, plate tectonics, carbon and uranium dating, radioactivity.
Repeatedly we are told in the bible that various audiences were amazed usually by some momentary suspension of the laws of physics, but don't you think even a single vaccine, antibiotic, or lightbulb would have been infinitely more amazing (and useful, the sort of thing a compassionate, all knowing father would show his children)?

Is America Really Plunging Into Darkness - If Progress Made Over My Lifetime is Any Indication, then No, Not At All

The headlines make it easy to believe that we live in a country where violence, poverty, and hate crimes are all on the rise, leading to some inexorable climax.  Yet a careful review of the numbers even over my half century of life indicates that it just ain't so. 
The America some of us were born into had some pretty bad things that have improved or been abolished since the year I was born.
There was no Medicare or Medicaid; the elderly and poor had to choose between food and medicine and often lacked both.  We had thousands of nuclear weapons and seemed prepared to use them; MAD (mutually assured destruction) was not a joke but an official government policy.   Communists were believed to be everywhere - making our movies; teaching our kids; providing healthcare; and only patriotic organizations such as the John Birch Society could ferret them out.  We were so obsessed with communism that we almost started a nuclear war over missile shipments to Cuba, and were about to begin a horrible, protracted decade of fighting in a tiny country few Americans had heard of but in which over 58 thousand would die, along with millions of Vietnamese. 

Neighborhoods and marriages were split along religious lines - Protestant versus Catholics.  If you were Jewish or Muslim, you need not apply (to country clubs, many schools, or even elite universities).  Marriage between an African American and a white person was illegal in most states.  Not only was gay marriage not on anyone's radar screen, most states had enforced sodomy laws and it was still a scandal to be considered homosexual, and cause for dismissal or even incarceration.  Psychiatrists and psychologists officially labeled homosexuality a pathological condition. 

 

There was a time when gay meant only jolly and other words for homosexual were nasty and hate-filled.

Making jokes about women, people of color, immigrants, Jews, homosexuals, and people with cognitive impairments was mainstream and widely condoned.  Homophobia was not a word and would not have been understood as something bad.
Adult working women were commonly referred to as "girls" or "my girl" by her boss (who was always a man).  In some jobs, it was still expected that a woman remain single.  If she got engaged or pregnant (or both), she was expected to resign since her husband would support her. 



Violence against women was largely condoned - advertisements featured men spanking their wives and when Ralph threatened to beat his wife Alice on the Honeymooners it elicited laughter, not stunned silence.


Misogyny and romanticizing of tobacco all in one. 
 
Children did not wear seat belts.  Most cars did not have seat belts installed.  There were no air bags, anti-lock brakes, or even shatter-proof windshields. 
The average car got about the same mileage as a Hummer today and emitted far more CO2 per mile driven.   There was no such thing as recycling or sustainability.  Green was still only a color, not a political movement or way of life.  Plastic was considered a life-altering miracle product and asbestos was a great insulator. 
Cigarettes were fashionable and even healthy.  Your doctor was likely to smoke and physicians endorsed certain brands of cigarettes.

 

A bit before my time, but perhaps some old waiting room magazines might have contained this ad. 
 
The homicide rate was 4.9 (per 100,000 per year) the year I was born, but was on its way to more than double to a peak of 10.2 in 1980 where it remained for over a decade (it was 9.5 in as recently as 1993) before plunging to its current 4.7, lower than when I was born. 
Life expectancy at birth was 73.7 years when I was born; it is now over 81 years.  Not only are more people living longer, they are living far more functional, pain-free lives thanks to extraordinary advances in medicine, surgery, stroke prevention, and arthritis treatment.
There was no such thing as a hate crime.  A president had just been murdered and in a few years his brother would be murdered too.
The n word was not only widely used, in many parts of the country it was the default way to refer to a black person (along with "boy").   The KKK was mainstream and had infiltrated many police departments, police municipalities, and churches.   

 

Note the conflation of integration and communism in this typical KKK billboard (the fact that such a billboard could be erected tells you much about how much times have changed). 

Martin Luther King who is now a hero was still a deeply controversial figure, hated in many parts of the country, and was to be dismissed even by President Johnson, annoyed that MLK continued to denounce the growing war in Vietnam as part of a cycle of poverty, racism, and violence.  Even many well-intentioned Americans felt that the civil rights movement should have ended with Civil Rights legislation; shouldn't black folks should be grateful Jim Crow was dead? He would be murdered too when I was starting school.   It would take almost a quarter century from his death to get Arizona to approve Martin Luther King Day as an official holiday in 1992, following a tourist boycott.
So, yes, we have problems to solve, but let's not forget that we are making progress.  It it seems sometimes that we aren't it might well be a sign, paradoxically enough, of our progress.  Cutting the homicide rate in half from its peak isn't enough.  Americans seemed complacent about having a slightly higher homicide rate when I was born than they do now, so our bar for measuring violence and determining what an acceptable level of violence is has been lowered - our standards have surged.  And in 1964, when a disproportionate number of the victims of violence were - as is true today - people of color, white America generally didn't see that as a problem.  We do now. 
I hope we see many things as problems that our parents and grandparents dismissed or weren't even aware of, but that doesn't mean they weren't problems then or we aren't solving them today.