Funny... I'm sitting here at my kitchen counter typing this on a "laptop" that is more powerful than early mainframes, not using any phone line or minute charges. I'm not wired to anything except AC--laptops still eat batteries.
I spent a good part of a career, as did my siblings, in an industry that did not even exist when I was in grade school, and now has gone through multiple generations. I've owned almost as many computers as I have cars, going from 16K of RAM to the monster I have now, for which I cannot find a bag to fit. Screen is nice though--bigger than the little screen on the Philco TV the old man got in 1950. Damn thing was always breaking down.
I remember carbon paper and a world without copying machines.
Cars, brand new cars used to cost 1/100th of what they do now. Not all of that is due to the change in the value of the dollar. Compare what you are buying. The average low-end car today has far more features standard than the best ones of even four or five decades ago.
We have a lot of stuff. We have a lot of stuff that is better. We have Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio, and what's more you can send text messages on it.
[We have some other stuff that comes with that. Yesterday I watched in my rearview as the man behind me was obviously texting as he drove eight city blocks. Whenever he was stopped he was looking down at his lap and his hands were not visible on the wheel, and when traffic started he stayed stopped until he noticed the cars around him moving.]
And what is with the disappearing children? Did we just not know about that or pretend it didn't happen?
As kids we used to leave the house and be gone for hours. "Where did you go?" "Out." "What did you did you do?" "Nothing." There were few organized sports outside of school. I played baseball in sandlot pickup games until Little League came to town. Then I stopped because I could not afford a uniform and glove even if I had been selected, which I would not have been. The parents quickly made it about winning rather than playing. I still hate parents like that.
I was in Denver attending a week-long seminar when Columbine happened. The facilitator invited people to talk about the event, to express their feelings. We got to one man, probably about my age, who started to pontificate about how things used to be better when we had communities and traditional values. I was not very nice about it when I pointed out that in his perfect gone-by-world, the abuse and alcoholism and child rapes happened behind the white picket fences and he was naive to think otherwise.
I don't know how much better or worse things are. They are different in some ways and not in others. Some quite substantively. My parents never went to Europe. For half of their lives they would have had to take a boat. I've been eight times I think, though it took me a long time to make my first trip. My mother had been to Havana, something I could not have done if I wanted to.
It is no longer necessary or meet to deal with your psychological dilemmas in years of analysis. Freud was the big thing in the fifties and sixties, big to the point of regular New Yorker cartoons about analyst-less Augusts in the city. Drugs are big now, but there are also a lot of other "talking cure" modalities as well, and all those self-development workshops.
We live in a world where one of the world's oldest institutions has to have its local branches sued into near bankruptcy in order to stop hiding its career pederasts, and where an eighteen year-old high school student can end up having to broadcast his status as a "level three sex offender" for the rest of his life for having had sex with the sixteen year-old he is now married too.
Corporations are people again. Historical note: after the Civil War the 14th amendment was interpreted by the Court to apply to corporations rather than the freed slaves it was intended for. But then we knew some of the current Justices were throwbacks, didn't we?
When my father moved from Ohio to Boston in 1959 he brought with him a large wooden shipping crate that was full of albums of classical music on 78s! We had the changer to play them that was also able to play 33s. Last year one of my projects was to convert my 300 plus vinyl albums to MP3 files. I didn't do the world's best job, but my ears aren't what they used to be and now at least I have the music in a form I can play. The wife hated hearing the noise that even the best treated vinyl could get.
You tell me what has gotten better or worse.
For myself, I'm not sure I'd want to be born now or coming of college age. I have this nagging feeling that the world is about to really go to shit, despite or because of all the technology (take your pick). College is becoming more and more unaffordable. I was lucky to have gotten a lot of help from the schools I went to and even then I was paying off loans twenty years afterwards.
This has been a pastiche, maybe even a little pointless, but interesting for me to muse about anyway.
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