Errrr, It may not be "progress" as such, which implies getting better. In many cases it's getting worse.
I agree that everything changes, just as eventually everything ends, good bad or indifferent.
People look back on the 50s and early 60s as the epitome of western civilisation, which IMO it was, but only for western people. The rest of the world got the dirty end of the stick.
However, the good times ended with Vietnam, an atrocity that should never have happened, and likely never would had JFK lived.