“The Good Old Days Weren’t so Good” OR “They Don’t Make 'em like they used to…Thank God!”
I’m just a little sick of people who preach about the good ol’ days. What the heck was so good about the good ol’ days?
It’s just too easy to knock everything today:
Everything is more dangerous, more expensive, blah, blah, blah. It’s a load of bunk.
Hey, guess what? Products are better, cheaper, and safer. People are smarter, more comfortable and better off than they were years ago. Money goes FARTHER! YEAH! Get a load of that! Who cares that bread cost a nickel in 1950-something? Proportionate to today’s incomes, houses, bread and a lot of other stuff is cheaper! Cheaper I tell ya! The movies too!
Time tends to smooth things over, and everything stored in the old memory chamber gets that warm fuzzy nostalgic feeling.
The good ol’ days probaly sucked: A miserable existence that no one would choose over today’s world.
And don’t get technical on my ass with trying to define the good ol’ days. You KNOW who you are (old farts) and you know the time you are talking about.
The world has improved, and the past is not as good as the present. These are the best of times…
I think you’re right. In history class in college we read a book called “The Good Old Days: Boy Were They Terrible”, and it brings up many of the points in your post. It’s just like how I can look back on the days when I was poor as dirt and once ate Kraft macaroni and cheese for a week straight and think “Good times…good times…”
Advancements in health care can make your mind up pretty quickly on this one, when you tote up the number of folk you know who would likely be dead.
I guess some healthy, wealthy white males might not have minded it that much, but …
Good thread…there must be something screwy about the human mind…perhaps we remember only the good and forget that bad!
My granfather was born in 1889, and died at nearly 90, I talked to him quite a lot, and HE had no illusions about the early 20th century! He frankly told me that life was very hard and DANGEROUS!
He was a Boston policeman around the time of the great influenza epidemic (ca 1918). There wasn’t a thing that the doctors of the day could do - people died like flies! Oh, and there were lots of flies around. If people today had to buy their food from a 1918-style market, most would get sick! -no refrigeration, dirty conditions, and flies!
Don’t laugh - without it, the South would never have experienced an economic boom and our economy would be vastly different (i.e. worse).
This is a highly under-rated advancement that has had enourmous impact on our culture AND our economy.
I remember working part time in a video store during the summer months in Philly, when the A/C quit. There was no ventilation of which to speak. I quipped, “Damn, it’s hot in here.” A gentlemen, about the age of 40, said to me, “Ya know, years go we didn’t have any air conditioning.”
I responded, “Yeah, and when it got hot, you complained, right?”
LONG LIVE AIR CONDTIONING! Anybody ever get a dose of the air conditoning theory in school? Re: South’s expansion economically.
We all start to sound like our parents at some point in our lives. I have friends my own age who actually say things like " :rolleyes: Kids these days," and “You call that music!?!?!”
Actually back then they actually built things with a lot of ventilation. I live in Dallas and I’ve found that as long as you have plenty of ventilation and shade the heat really isn’t unbearable.
Ya, but are we really better off? Sure we’ve made tremendous advances in medical science and greatly improved our quality of life (though mainly in western cultures)through improved hygiene etc. But… are we causing irreparable damage to the human genome in the process by otherwise extending the lives of individuals and allowing them to mature and reproduce where they would otherwise succumb to a variety of diseases/conditions?
“Irreparable damage to the human genome”? What on earth do you mean?
Quite frankly, there really aren’t any physiological boundaries any more, other than self-contrived ones for sport. Being able to hide from lions really just doesn’t matter to your average New Yorker. (Though that may change when Detroit plays the Giants.) Being able to choose between poisonous and non-poisonous mushrooms isn’t a skill necessary to shopping in your local supermarket.
Physical labor is continually being outsourced to mental labor. Ergo, future generations will have less and less need for physical strength, and so defects to physical form and function will be less important even should they grow in number.
'Course, you may be arguing that we leave ourselves weaker for the next super-flu, but quite frankly I think the human race would have been completely fucked by the AIDS virus (no pun intended) had it shown up in the Middle Ages or earlier.
Galileo7: My reproducing days are long behind me, but I hope to hell my life can be prolonged for a good many years to come. I don’t want to succumb to any damn thing and I don’t want anyone else telling me its time to go. My opinion is that hell yes we are better off.
Philster, you impudent young whippersnapper, as an old fart, I find myself agreeing with most of what you say: Things are a hell of lot better than during the “good old days,” whatever they might be. But it seems to me that movies have gotten really way too expensive–when I was a teenager, movies were a relatively cheap date. From what I see now, teenagers must make a lot more money than I did or else movie dates are “Dutch-treat.”
I would just point out that in some ways we are becoming acclimated to our improved lives, which increases our dependence on them. The example of air-conditioning is a case of this. Of course it’s better to have air-conditioning than to not have it, but we exagerate how hard they had it in the good old days by comparing them to ourselves. Now, we rarely experience a climate that diverges from a 5 degree radius, so when we do it bothers us alot more.
John Corrado,
I’m not sure if you meant your point about the AIDS virus literally. But if you did, I completely disagree. There was a whole lot less promiscuity and mobility back in the Middle Ages, and it’s likely that the AIDS virus would have had no effect at all in those days. In fact, for all we know it may have shown up dozens of times.
Yes, with progress comes some pain. Sure, many people are born with disorders, that without modern science and medicine, would have them perishing long before they can reproduce. And people live longer…sometimes on life support…but the overwhelming benefits of modern science/medicine speak for themselves. I’ll concede there are some drawbacks, but look at the overall postive impact.
Damage to the human genome: The issue is what? I can think of a certain Hocking (spelling?) guy sitting in a wheel chair, heavily dependent on modern medicine. It’s all about brains, not brawn, for humans. We are incredibly adept at surviving in our enviroment.
I agree with IzzyR on this one. Although there was undoubtedly some promiscuous sex going on during the Middle Ages, it takes a lot of (heterosexual) sex for AIDS transmission to become likely. Most people were peasants duing the MA and tended to marry young (often as a result of unintended pregnancy, which was more likely to occur than now). In Africa, AIDS is spread by migrant workers and the prostitutes who service them. In the MA the peasants were tied to the land.
As for the “GODs”, well there were time and places in the past where there was less crime (“you could leave you doors unlocked at night”) and children were better behaved, but all in all, things are much better today, hands down.