Well, I guess it depends on your perspective, Keith. The "olden days" of 69-72 were hardly the olden days for me. We tend to look back at "golden years" but at the time, to the general public, they were not the golden years. As the antis thinned our numbers, it's now far better gunning than it was with a blind on every pond and point.
Sure, I can look back to my one-room school with two-holer outhouses for the boys and girls, when I took my .22 Mossberg and ran my trap-line coming home from school. Those communities are healthier and happier now, the kids getting decent educations, not confined to a life in fishing boats.
You don't have to wonder about what has changed: everything. In the olden days you mentioned, my children learned on TV of escape velocities and Keplerian ellipses of the US space program, politics, Vietnam and Viet Cong, and now we share instantaenous exchanges here with our doublegun members everywhere.
It doesn't get any better than now for those of here, generally speaking. Looking back, living on our memories, is to my mind self-defeating. We're not the same persons we were then, it's not the same world. Only through acts of love, creativity and participatiion are we alive and burning to the end.
