The good ol' 1950's

"Looking for work" by soto made me think about myself and reminded me what it was like to be a kid. i remember my brothers and i used to watch movies like "rocky" and "superman" and after it was over we would pretend we were rocky in a fight beating up on our opponent or that we were superman flyingthrough the air and invincible.
In soto's short story he tells of how as a child he much wanted his family to be just like the "picture perfect" ones he would see on television. He tried to get his family to wear shoes to the dinner table and asked his mom to make turtle soup or something so that they would be more like the ideal families he saw on television. Soto wrote the story from his childhood perspective. I think that was good because it made you think as a child when you were reading it; bringing back memories and helping you relate the soto as a child. I think the ideas in the story were pretty much right on as far as how kids think and are influenced by things such as the television. Soto, in his story, thought that the families on television were just examples of how normal families are and live. He didn't understand that that wasn't reality. That the typical family functioned far from that. If only family life was that simple and care free. Unfortunately, most families don't function in that way, but that is usually not the message that people get if they watch shows like "leave it to beaver". In fact i think that same principle is true today of things like advertising, television, magazines, and the media. Images of "picture purfect" models and people are presented and is recognized or seen by the world as normal or ideal and if you don't fit that criteria and look like them, then you are not normal. The truth is that you are more normal that you think you are and the "fake" people advertized are not normal. They are usually made or changed to look or appear that way. Sometimes even the use image editing is behind it, but we don't realize that.
In "What we really miss about the 1950's", Stephanie Coontz writes about the popular myth of the 1950's were the ideal decade for the American family. I think she did a very good job. She used a lot of statistics to back up her writing which really strengthened her argument. She also looked at both sides, which was also good. I think that she was trying to say that things weren't as picture perfect as they appeared back then. There was a lot more than meets the eye. They had problems back then just as we have problems today. They had to deal with issues like gender roles, discrimination, race, and much more. Most of that is probably overlooked a lot of the time.
I thought it was interesting how both stories were about this sort of "picture perfect" family, but were written in completely different ways. Both made me look at the subject from completely different perspectives and i think that is cool.