The 1970s

The 1970s, as remembered by the narrator, combine urban hardship and cultural variety with a feeling that the decade lacked the epoch-making force of the one before it. His view is personal rather than detached: the poverty and violence he recalls from New York City sit alongside his sense of belonging in Brooklyn, while the decade’s broader mood becomes a measure of what his generation believes it missed.

Hardship and Belonging

The narrator remembers the 1970s as difficult years for New York City, when many people were extremely poor and violence was widespread. That account is grounded in his upbringing in Brooklyn, where he felt at home among a Babel of races and customs. He describes his family as free of major material troubles but unable to afford many things they would have liked; the qualification places his experience between deprivation and comfort, rather than at either extreme.

Between Two Decades

In the narrator’s generational comparison, the 1970s follow the tumult of the 1960s and precede an 1980s that seems to him to have no comparable epic character. He associates the earlier decade with music, marches, the summer of love, drug experimentation, Woodstock, and contraception; the 1970s, by contrast, bring the end of the Vietnam War and the arrival of disco, flared trousers, and racial emancipation. The list presents the period as one of transition: marked by social change, but lacking, in his eyes, the singular drama that would make it feel like a defining generational moment.

The Reagan-Era Contrast

Looking toward the 1980s, the narrator casts Ronald Reagan’s politics as a return to the spirit of the 1950s. His satirical image of an old shaman summoning that decade’s spirits turns political change into a kind of national enchantment, while money’s advance and the celebration of free enterprise suggest a culture reorganizing its loyalties around wealth. Against that picture, the 1970s occupy an uneasy middle ground: a period of hardship and change that the narrator recalls vividly, yet describes as a generation that had missed the train to history.