Just finished a book on the '39 world’s fair. The author concluded that today, we live in the utopian society that they predicted back then. Thinking about it, I can’t help but wonder if he’s right. I’m not talking about the pie-in-the-sky personal airplane stuff, but the things that are mundane today but just wishful thinking back then- a unified transportation system, planned rural communities for workers (today we call them suburbs) home automation to relive the drugery of housework, television, long-distance phone calls and the like.
I know plenty of people of modest means who live exceptionally fulfilling lives, and are able to indulge in exotic and esoteric hobbies that used unthinkable for even the very rich. I think about my Grandparents, and their reflexive saving and even hoarding, and think how hard life must have been to make those habits last a lifetime. Adjusted for inflation, everything is probably much cheaper today.
So, your thoughts? Is this the future?
As someone on the low end of the economic spectrum, I can say a big no. The poor may not work in the coal mines, but working two or three jobs just to get by is probably worse than working one big one. And the poor are no closer to health care than they were in the thirties- people still lose teeth, limbs, lives to lack of access. The poor still have it pretty bad, we just don’t notice as much because the jobs the poor do (mostly service jobs) go to great lengths to make sure their employees look clean and smile a lot (the guy at McDonald’s likely isn’t smiling because he’d having a great day.
In many parts of the country (including just about all of California), home ownership is increasingly an impossible American Dream. The kind of job that you work for decades and retire with gold watches is a thing of the past- more and more people work on “independent contractor” status. Massive layoffs are now considered a great cost cutting measure, not the grave action they used to be. Workers of all stripes have it pretty bad right now.
It used to be that you could get married, get a house, and start an adult life pretty young- even college was optional. That is a thing of the distant, distant past. College graduates today are lucky to get work at all. I don’t know anyone in their twenties that is in a stable “adult” position in their life.
And then there are the cultural factors. Entertainment is mass produced and not so good. We live isolated in suburbs, with only the mall to solace us. Indeed, most free and fulfilled modes of entertainment have been phased out and replaced with expensive ones. Movie tickets are ten dollars! Nutritious food has been replaced with prepackaged crap and fast food, making us sickly. Fresh produce has had the good taste engineered out of it in exchange for shelf life in huge supermarkets. The social networks of extended family and community now longer support us. Our houses are built crammed next to each other, without much in terms of backyards, and with walls made of little more than cardboard (these new suburbs start crumbling in years). I guess what I’m saying is that it is easy to get more stuff, but harder to get anything of quality.
Life right now can be pretty hard and empty. This isn’t much different than the past, but it’s certainly not utopia.
Utopia, I don’t think so. My parents were born at a time when horse and cart was the main mode of transportation (1904 & 1905) in their life span mankind went from this to walking on the moon. The changes were enormous, but their life wasn’t made that much better. They still worked all day, every day (farm). changes, or new inventions make work easier for some, but the working class still must work. Utopia, I don’t think so.
Spelling and grammer subject to change withour notice.
Well said Even Sven!
We seem to have lost a good deal from what we had in the past. Community is almost non-existent. Every person is out for him/her self and it’s a become a dog eat dog world. Politicians in Washington seem to be doing their best to continue to ruin our environment (mercury, pesticides, etc. litter the environment). Inflation is supposedly non-existent according to government figures but real experience contradicts the numbers. Only 17% of the families in CA can afford the media priced home. Commercial advertising is pervasive and is difficult to escape or avoid. Corporate taxes are the lowest they have been since 1930 (except for 1983) while middle-class individuals are paying more taxes, despite Bush’s tax cuts.
We still work 40-50 hours week. Add in commuting times and the average worker has maybe 3-4 hours per day for themselves and their family.
It just feels like out society is disintegrating as we watch.
Oh, come on now! Every single one of you is sitting there communicating in a way that would have been considered nothing but magic in 1939. You all have running water, electricity, a telephone, and probably your own bathroom. Do you think that at some time in the glorious past it was not a dog-eat-dog world? Fugettaboutit.
I’ll try to take a few of these things one by one.
The very idea that the environment needed preservation was once considered a radical idea. Ever see pictures of strip mines in the 1930s?
And what percent of families in 1939 could afford their own individual home? As opposed to a steaming tenement?
There are plenty of 20-somethings that are doing reasonably well at supporting themselves, with or without a college education. If you don’t know (or at least see) them, you simply have a limited set of acquaintances.
In my parents’ time college was not optional. It was impossible. Especially for a woman. College was for rich people, for the most part. The rest had very little option than to start an adult life pretty young. Sometimes to help support the rest of the family. Oh, and don’t forget that those families tended to be somewhat larger than today, since birth control was not easy to come by – in fact, there were places where it was illegal.
Did you know that when labor unions first came into being, their **GOAL ** was a 40-50 hour week? It was not uncommon for a person to work six days a week, 12 hours or more a day, from their teens or younger until the day they died. The goal of retirement and taking life easy in one’s “golden” years was unheard of for the common man (or woman) a century ago.
Disagree again. Obviously the poor still have worse health care, and I wish as much as you do that the system were better. But you can’t be turned away into the street for lack of resources. Did you know that used to happen?
Read *The Jungle * by Upton Sinclair.
Yes, fresh produce that you grow in your own garden is a gazillion times better than what you buy in the supermarket. You can still grow it if you want to. Nobody’s holding a gun to anyone’s head and forcing them to eat fast food. If the food you eat is making you sickly, you are making poor choices. You can actually get more, not less, fresh and healthy food now than you could in 1939.
Did you know that there was a time when an actual fresh orange was a rare treat? The very idea of getting lettuce and asparagus in New York in February would have been thought outrageously luxurious (if not impossible) not so very long ago. Before frozen foods were available, mostly the only vegetables you had were either stored root vegetables (which were not so nice by the end of the winter), or canned. Do you know how much nutrition is in canned vegetables? Read the label some time. Of course in 1939 this information would not have been on the label, so you had no idea you were basically getting salted fiber.
People on food stamps, Medicaid and other forms of social assistance today can be better nourished and have better medical care than their grandparents. Please note that I am not in any way trying to minimize the fact that things can and should improve, and that some folks seem to get more than their share of bad breaks.
No, life is not perfect. But the type of life that most of us consider standard would have been unspeakable luxury in 1939. A lot of people today have a vague and unrealistic image of the past, a mystic blending of The Waltons, Life With Father and The Little House on the Prairie. 'Twas never so.
In the sense that Thomas More used this word to describe the ideal society, and the word means “nowhere”, I’d say yes.
Come on-- you live in Santa Cruz. Of course you don’t know any stable adults. 
Spend some time “over the hill” and you’ll get to know quite a few. (For those not famaliar with the Bay area, there is a mountain range that separates the coastal communities like Santa Cruz from those in, say, Silicon Valley. Although both areas are pretty close together, you have to go “over the hill” to get from one to the other.)
Things are pretty good for those of us lucky enough to have it good (myself included), but a utopia? Nonsense. Poverty is still rampant abroad and domestically, there’s still war and violent death and all sorts of nasty, bad, doubleplusungood stuff.
[quote=No, life is not perfect. But the type of life that most of us consider standard would have been unspeakable luxury in 1939.[/quote]
If life ain’t perfect, then it ain’t utopia. And I have a feeling the way the majority of Americans were living in 1939 would’ve been pretty astounding to someone living in 1820s London. Doesn’t make 1939 a utopia, either.
Just… you know… use your imagination on that formatting.
My feeling is that Utopia is in the eye of the beholder. I love my job and actually look foreward to going to work (I teach kung fu and yoga). I don’t think that any form of society exists that will please everyone, but I do believe that if you spend your life working in a field that you have a passion for and surround yourself with people you care for then you are as close to a utopian situation as any of us are ever going to get. Since society and government are alwase in a state of flux, all we can do in strive to find our place in the world, and spend our time doing something that brings us joy.