Has It Always Been the Best of Times and the Worst of Times?
Troubled Minds Want to Know
I’ve been watching the television series The Last of Us. It fits my mood. An apocalyptic tale of extinction where the survivors look so miserable that it might have been better if they’d died during the original breakout. This time it wasn’t a virus but a fungus that was creating havoc and destruction upon humankind. An aggressive measure of annihilation deemed incurable, guaranteeing a hideous death.
Woo hoo! Bring on the band. Mother Nature is on a roll — AGAIN!
The series isn’t just a good match for my emotional state, however. There’s a general mood permeating the country, maybe even the world. Our systems seem fragile, our economies volatile, our climate is changing, and even our social norms are morphing into something new and different. No wonder so many people want to return to the past, regress a couple of centuries to the good old bad old days.
I can do it myself, travel back in time. Give me an old black-and-white photo, and suddenly I remember summers at my grandparents as a kid. It is a time and place that remains snug in a memory bubble that my mind created, a perfect dream of simpler days.
But were those days really as serene and peaceful as I remember them? As I sat on my grandma’s front porch watching the dragonfly on a hot summer day while eating a bowl of ice cream covered with her strawberries, was that all there was to life?
Of course not!
My grandpa had black lung from working in the coal mines of Kentucky, a horrible way to make a living. With little to no protections for workers, humans were expendable daily while making someone else rich. They both grew up in the depression. My grandpa could remember one winter when the family had little else to eat but turnips from their garden that they stored in the root cellar. They could remember the polio epidemic. My husband’s great aunt contracted polio when she was a young mother and spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
Average life expectancies have only recently been doubled. Go back just a little in time, and people often died in childhood. Many old graveyards are filled with the graves of little children. Women died in childbirth regularly. A man could cut a finger while working and then later die of blood poisoning.
I get a kick out of the responses from people who belong to an old-photo Facebook group that I enjoy. Visual history is fascinating, but what I see in these old photos and what others see are two entirely different things. I’m talking photos of bedraggled people standing in front of their sod houses on the prairie, factory workers living in the London tenement houses, or barefoot children getting ready to report to the woolen mills. They led harsh lives with no clean water, very little to eat, early deaths, and no hope of things getting any easier. Yet one out of every three responses expressed admiration and a kind of envy, touting the simple days when people worked hard and slept soundly at night.
Never mind…
There’s no accounting for people’s perceptions or memories, for that matter. And history isn’t most students’ favorite class. That’s pretty apparent.
If I had the time to revisit history one century at a time, a theme would emerge. It would become quite clear that the lives our ancestors endured were grim — wars, diseases, starvation, the Dust Bowl, poverty, etc. The very idea of a thriving middle class is a recent concept. It didn’t exist in the past. Kings and serfs were the norm for centuries. How about Mt. Vesuvius wiping out an entire city? The average lifespan barely one hundred years ago was about half what it is today, forty-five instead of seventy-eight. And I haven’t even touched on medieval times. Those people were lucky to make it to thirty-five.
I’m convinced!
Yeah, once I started looking into this whole thing, I soon realized that it’s always been the best of times and the worst of times. People have always come kicking and screaming into this old world and struggled to survive. Death always wins. Mother Nature, too.
So now that I’ve convinced myself that the black and white photo of me as a child wasn’t the whole story, what do I think of today?
Well, here’s the good stuff.
We have fewer wars, longer lifespans, fatter bellies, and a middle class. We have lots of modern conveniences from AC to central heating and dishwashers to cars. We can stay cleaner, and our water sources for drinking are safer. In the last 150 years alone, we have made huge strides in medicine, vaccines, roads, electrical grids, computers, the internet, smartphones, and more. More people are literate, drive a car, and travel for pleasure. Of course, not all parts of the world live in such luxury, but certainly, there are many more prosperous people than our ancestors encountered.
You’d think that by now, we’d cherish our world, systems, and creative abilities. But unfortunately, we tend to take things for granted. Many people are too young to even remember the past, and those that do remember also have selective memories. History lessons are avoided or forgotten, and frankly, very few even give a crap.
To top it off, we run a true risk of losing it all either to a regressive movement, nuclear war, or careless guardianship. We don’t take care of the planet, and Mother Nature is pissed. It wouldn’t take much to strip us of our modern comforts while throwing us back into the grim times of our ancestors.
The best of times and the worst of times have always been with us. It’s just a matter of degree. We may very well be living in the best of times in the history of humankind, but it’s looking more and more likely that fate may end up forcing our hand.
An apocalypse may be in our future. We do love our apocalyptic movies. That’s for sure. Perhaps we sense that our days are numbered, that we’re going down with the ship. Who knows.
Or maybe scientists will save the day. Maybe they’ll find a way to make us live forever. Lots of people get excited about that idea. Not me. I have a feeling that if we do manage to get our act together and collaborate eventually, we’ll find ourselves right back where we started from, in a big, fat, self-created mess or completely overwhelmed by Mother Nature’s newest rampage. No matter how I look at it, the best of times and the worst of times ain’t going away any time soon.
We need evolution to speed up and save the day.
Teresa is an author, world citizen, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
