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To hear some tell it, when America finally woke up and smelled the seventies, something stank.

Gone was the sweetly perfumed peace, love, and understanding of prosperous post-war America. Gone, too, was the fresh-faced idealism and clean-cut complacency of a million year book photographs. In their place: Disillusionment with big government, big enterprise, and big institutions; dissatisfaction with the status quo, and a disturbing rise in crime, inflation, and mistrust. By the time The Exorcist was nauseating movie-goers and Tony Orlando and Dawn were singing about yellow ribbons and oak trees, the American landscape was littered with the political detritus and lingering shock of Kent State, Vietnam, Watergate, double digit inflation, war in Cambodia, and the Arab oil crisis. And that was only 1973.

The seventies. Considering their political, social, and economic legacies.
(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Bruce J. Schulman, author of “The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics”

and David Frum, author of “How We Got Here: The 70s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life — For Better or Worse.”

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The line between childhood and adulthood has perhaps never been quite as distinct as in a work by Norman Rockwell.

But a lot has happened since the paint dried on those Rockwell canvasses, and the line that separates the mature from the innocent is blurrier than ever. A Rockwell painting today might show a child at home, logging onto the family computer, into a world never depicted in Rockwell’s time: Teen Sex, Child Porn, Three Way Sex, Lesbian Sex. In the balm of a summer holiday once created to take children out of school so they could work on the family farm, the online connection brings, along with the promise of knowledge, a feeling of helplessness. A new study says that one in five children on-line has been sexually solicited, 25% have received unwanted pornographic material, and neither parental supervision nor on-line filters can help.

Online pornography is as much a fact of adolescence as the pizza parlor and learning to drive. How our children’s world is losing its innocence. How parents and children can.
(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Janis Wolak, from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire

The Reverend Lena Breen, Director of the Department of Religious Education of the Unitarian Universalist Association

and Kiku Adatto, Sociology Professor at Harvard University.