Yesterday is Gone

It is a good article. This line resonated with me:
I often feel as my grandmother did — that the price of everything is too high: the price of gasoline, the price of free speech, the price of a single mistake.
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The price of a single mistake frightens me. When I read about something like 83 year-old Lady Susan Hussey being asked to quit her job after 62 years and leave the palace in shame, it worries me a great deal. Whether her questions to Miss Fulani were based on a sub-conscious racism or just the fall back conversation opener she has used at these functions all her life, to be reviled and shunned across the world is too much punishment.

I live in a small town with an aging, conservative population, but I've recently heard of several people being fired because they failed to refer to a co-worker by the preferred pro-noun. Societies are always changing, but when the change is forced on people with so much speed and so little tolerance it seems ruthless and cruel to me.
 
Della said:
It is a good article. This line resonated with me:

The price of a single mistake frightens me. When I read about something like 83 year-old Lady Susan Hussey being asked to quit her job after 62 years and leave the palace in shame, it worries me a great deal. Whether her questions to Miss Fulani were based on a sub-conscious racism or just the fall back conversation opener she has used at these functions all her life, to be reviled and shunned across the world is too much punishment.
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I don't think Lady Susan was being racist. I once heard my own mother asking the exact same thing, of an Asian sales clerk in an optometry store. I was very embarrassed, but did not butt in. My mother at times could be foolish, but not cruel. Just curious, not racist. Sticky Wicket eh what?
 
Over the eons, having absorbed expressions/pronunciations from elsewhere, I have occasionally been asked whether I'm originally from 'here' or 'there' - people who are from 'here' or 'there' know that I'm not, but people who aren't sometimes don't.

On a similar vein...presumptions......my oldest friend, of some 55 years now, was born in a Japanese internment camp in British Columbia. In the late 1960s I went to a very crowded party where he was already in attendance.

I found him in a corner with a Japanese girl who was talking the proverbial 'mile a minute'........my buddy was responding with variations of "Uh huh".

When she took off, I asked him what she said.

"I dunno" he replied, "I don't speak Japanese".
 
Prices sometimes shock me too, but then I ask, "OK, so is my financial situation and my life changed?" Actually, many things about my finances and my life are much better than back when I could buy a car for $2,000. But somethings not so. I was thinking just the other day while prowling around in the woods. This has nothing to do with finances, but does change my life in a big way. The woods have changed. Most of the woods are gone, and what's left over is bombarded by human traffic eeking out the remaining pleasures that I once took for granted. Much of the quietness is invaded by the noises of high speed off road equipment, except for those small places designated for no motorized equipment.

This is just one thing, but I was thinking about how much I missed these past experiences, starting way back in my childhood, when my family would travel to Wisconsin and rent a cabin with an outhouse with it's own dock and flat bottomed rowboat, which my father and I would use to travel along the shoreline casting for bass and northern pike. The lake was often a glassy calm. Now those cabins and fishing experiences are gone, replaced by elbow to elbow summer homes, and speed boats towing water skiers. We can still find similar experiences, but they involve expensive flights in float planes landing on isolated lakes as far away as the Canadian Tundra.

While I'm sad, I'm also glad that I lived at a time when I could actually experience those simpler times gone buy. I often believe my life happened in the best of times. I had one foot in a quiet slower moving past and the other in an exciting digital age, but I never really adjusted to such a dense population explosion in a positive way.
 
I think many of us would like to go back to the simpler and less expensive times. I have no regrets spending 30 years in the military, but there are some things that I would do differently, but time moves on and waits for no one. I heard that somewhere, but it’s very true.

My only regret from the military is having a fellow Marine losing a rank because of returning to base drunk. I was too young and being an Officer, maybe a bit overzealous. I learned from that experience and did apologize to him almost a year later.

Prices have risen, probably more than wages over the years have, but people earn more money today than any other time. My niece came to visit me for 4 days over Thanksgiving and she had just received a promotion and raise and said she had to tell someone. I was stunned at the amount of money she earns for what she does. She spends a lot of time traveling.
 
Most data seems to show that real wages have been pretty stable, or stagnant, in our working lifetimes. I am a bit skeptical, it seems to me that houses have gotten bigger and we have a whole lot of new gadgets now that have become "necessities". Things like our computers, cell phones, big color TVs, etc. It is hard to compare standards of living accurately.
For most Americans, real wages have barely budged for decades _ Pew Research Center.jpg
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-ta...rs-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
 
According to the author of this piece, "Holidays, heroes, religion, biology, childhood, currency, reality — all of it is being “reimagined” by a generation of people who have no historical memory, or a reflexive disdain for it."

Prices and currency values are relative. Sure, I blanch a bit at the grocery store but as @JustDave said, my finances are in far better shape than when cars cost $2000. So I try to bear that in mind.

Currency changes? Pfffttt.... During my parents' lifetimes they saw the US abandon first the gold standard then the silver standard.

Cars may have been cheaper but consider the many safety, mechanical and comfort improvements since we were kids. It's rare to see a car pulled off to the side of the road due to mechanical issues, a commonplace occurrence from the first Model T to roll off the assembly line through at least the 1980s.

Articles like these wax poetic for the "good old days," forgetting that those days weren't all that wonderful for females, children, people of color, many immigrants, gays (yeah, they were around back then - and were often tormented or beaten to a pulp simply for existing) and more.

We have no claim on the future. It belongs to those generations whom the author claims have no historical memory or have a reflexive disdain for it. By my reckoning, what they disdain is the whitewashing of truth - starting with the hero worshiping of Christopher Columbus, a dreadful human by nearly all historical accounts.
 
Pepper said:
I don't think Lady Susan was being racist. I once heard my own mother asking the exact same thing, of an Asian sales clerk in an optometry store. I was very embarrassed, but did not butt in. My mother at times could be foolish, but not cruel. Just curious, not racist. Sticky Wicket eh what?
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Of course she wasn't being racist, not one little bit. When we as white people go anywhere other than our homes, people will ask us where we're from... is that Racist ?.. of course it isn't. It's a genuine query.. where are you from ?.. a genuine interest... Are we now to be put in the position where only white people can be asked ''where are you from''?

That woman went there to deliberately stir up trouble for the royal family. She wasn't even using her real name.. and further to that she's the first cousin of Meghan markles' personal Photographer..
 
StarSong said:
Terming them as "Necessity" is an interesting justification for atrocities.
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The 'necessity' was directed at doing what you have to do against those who, if given the opportunity, might/would do it to you. 'Atrocities' were often the norm.....everywhere.

Kipling: "When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier".

This is not a cotton batten world, although those who have been sheltered from harsh realities might like to think so.
 
Nemo2 said:
The 'necessity' was directed at doing what you have to do against those who, if given the opportunity, might/would do it to you. 'Atrocities' were often the norm.....everywhere.

Kipling: "When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier".

This is not a cotton batten world, although those who have been sheltered from harsh realities might like to think so.
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I'm not going to argue the numerous atrocities foisted on various minding-their-own-business people by foreign invaders with superior firepower, other than to say that it's only claimed to be "necessary" by those who prevail.

Putin thinks invading Ukraine is justified and necessary. Most Ukrainians have a different perspective. Perhaps those pathetic Ukrainians should stop living in a cotton batten world and just give up their land and autonomy to Russia.

If Britain hadn't found it "necessary" to colonize Afghanistan, perhaps the Afghani people wouldn't have found it "necessary" to remove British soldiers by whatever means they found handy.

All this aside, my point stands. Future generations have the right - and indeed the obligation - to perceive and interpret history through the filters and moral stances they deem appropriate. Which they will, just as generations before them have done.
 
StarSong said:
I'm not going to argue the numerous atrocities foisted on various minding-their-own-business people by foreign invaders with superior firepower, other than to say that it's only claimed to be "necessary" by those who prevail.

Putin thinks invading Ukraine is justified and necessary. Most Ukrainians have a different perspective. Perhaps those pathetic Ukrainians should stop living in a cotton batten world and just give up their land and autonomy to Russia.

If Britain hadn't found it "necessary" to colonize Afghanistan, perhaps the Afghani people wouldn't have found it "necessary" to remove British soldiers by whatever means they found handy.

All this aside, my point stands. Future generations have the right - and indeed the obligation - to perceive and interpret history through the filters and moral stances they deem appropriate. Which they will, just as generations before them have done.
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History, it is said, is written by the Victors......then sometimes, I might add, reinterpreted after the fact when it makes no difference, by 'some members of future generations'.......if the Turks had won the Battle of Vienna in 1683, if the Normans hadn't won the Battle of Hastings, if Alexander the Great hadn't invaded Persia............."If we clap our hands, Tinker Bell will fly again".
 
hollydolly said:
Of course she wasn't being racist, not one little bit. When we as white people go anywhere other than our homes, people will ask us where we're from... is that Racist ?.. of course it isn't. It's a genuine query.. where are you from ?.. a genuine interest... Are we now to be put in the position where only white people can be asked ''where are you from''?

That woman went there to deliberately stir up trouble for the royal family. She wasn't even using her real name.. and further to that she's the first cousin of Meghan markles' personal Photographer..
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I agree, and one of the palace security men said that part of Lady Susan's job at these sort of affairs was to approach people and try to put them at ease. Asking them where they were from was a standard opening, particularly if someone came in what appeared to be native dress from another country. She would then give the royal host or hostess a heads up like, "So and so is from Nigeria, she has brought a present for you," I just hate to see people like her thrown to the wolves, without a chance to defend themselves.

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The inflation part of change doesn't bother me, I remind myself that wages have risen, too, and I have no desire to return to the 1950's. I don't think that's what the article was saying. It's the social changes that make villains of ordinary people and hatred for anything traditional that bothers me.
 
StarSong said:
If Britain hadn't found it "necessary" to colonize Afghanistan, perhaps the Afghani people wouldn't have found it "necessary" to remove British soldiers by whatever means they found hand
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@hollydolly and others in the UK. To be clear, I wasn't picking on Britain - the US's hands are plenty dirty when it comes to poking our noses, weapons and soldiers where they were not wanted, needed or welcomed.

I was merely responding to the Kipling quote.
 
Ha!! You reap what you sow....

  • Charity's founder was asked where she was 'really from' on a visit to the palace
  • A series of anonymous allegations were made about the charity and its finances
  • The GLA is investigating whether grants were used 'as they were intended'

The charity at the heart of the latest Buckingham Palace race row could face an official probe into its finances in response to a string of claims made online.

The Charity Commission is reportedly 'assessing material' related to abuse and domestic violence charity Sistah Space, which offers support to victims of abuse and violence within the African and Caribbean communities.

Meanwhile the Greater London Assembly is now said to be re-examining whether thousands of pounds in grant money given to the charity was 'used as intended'.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...-row-accusers-charity-string-allegations.html
 
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