When I was a kid in the 60's the world was pretty fucked up.

People died of diseases we can cure today.
We lived under an imminent threat of nuclear war.
We had war, racism and poverty back then too -- it all wasn't Ozzie and Harriet back then. We had desperate, acute poverty back then and not the whiny ass pseudo-poverty of today. I remember seeing the sharecroppers' houses that my grandfather called "slave shacks" in the Carolinas.

The was more working class hope for upward mobility and some people made it. That is the reason behind the nostalgia but life wasn't better then than it is today.