Maybe we don't have it so bad

R

RB-TX

Member
Maybe we don't have it that bad.

It’s a mess out there now. Hard to discern between what’s a real threat and what is just simple panic and hysteria. For a small amount of perspective at this moment, imagine you were born in 1900.

On your 14th birthday, World War I starts and ends on your 18th birthday. 22 million people perish in that war. Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until your 20th birthday. 50 million people die from it in those two years. Yes, 50 million.

On your 29th birthday, the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, the World GDP drops 27%. That runs until you are 33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy.

When you turn 39, World War II starts. You aren’t even over the hill yet. And don’t try to catch your breath. On your 41st birthday, the United States is fully pulled into WWII. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perish in the war.

Smallpox was epidemic until you were in your 40’s, as it killed 300 million people during your lifetime.

At 50, the Korean War starts. 5 million perish. From your birth, until you are 55 you dealt with the fear of Polio epidemics each summer. You experience friends and family contracting polio and being paralyzed and/or die.

At 55 the Vietnam War begins and doesn’t end for 20 years. 4 million people perish in that conflict. During the Cold War, you lived each day with the fear of nuclear annihilation. On your 62nd birthday, you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War. Life on our planet, as we know it, almost ended. When you turn 75, the Vietnam War finally ends.

Think of everyone on the planet born in 1900. How did they endure all of that? When you were a kid in 1985 and didn’t think your 85-year-old grandparent understood how hard school was. And how mean that kid in your class was. Yet they survived through everything listed above. Perspective is an amazing art. Refined and enlightening as time goes on. Let’s try and keep things in perspective.

Your parents and/or grandparents were called to endure all of the above – you are called to stay home and sit on your couch!!!
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The difference is, for the most part, it wasn’t killing us, Americans. It was mostly others that died. As for the Great Depression, yes, it was bad. The poor got a lot poorer, but then the poor are used to being poor and handle it very well. The masses were ok.

The rich were not. I remember the day my SIL said to me, a few years back, and “we might have to buy our next car on time.” WOW, 😂. Poor baby. Many the times in the early years I had to charge milk for the kids to have any and pay it off on time.

Vietnam was probably the worst thing mentioned by you. It tore our nation apart-heroes who met the call to arms, and cowards who fled their duty. But these things were known. The virus is not. It is the unknown that always brings the most fear. IMO.
 
You have helped my day! Perspective is a very important thing. I have always defined happy as the gap between where you are and where you think you should be. You can either change where you are, or change where you think you should be to be happy again. Right now, changing where I think I should be seems to be the answer.
 

Aneeda72 said:
The difference is, for the most part, it wasn’t killing us, Americans. It was mostly others that died. As for the Great Depression, yes, it was bad. The poor got a lot poorer, but then the poor are used to being poor and handle it very well. The masses were ok.

The rich were not. I remember the day my SIL said to me, a few years back, and “we might have to buy our next car on time.” WOW, 😂. Poor baby. Many the times in the early years I had to charge milk for the kids to have any and pay it off on time.

Vietnam was probably the worst thing mentioned by you. It tore our nation apart-heroes who met the call to arms, and cowards who fled their duty. But these things were known. The virus is not. It is the unknown that always brings the most fear. IMO.
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My parents lived through the depression and they were poor, and it affected them for the rest of their lives. My parents knew what going hungry was. I mean really going hungry, not milk on credit, no milk! My mother tells the story of when her father was sick and she had no money for a doctor. Her mother was dead and she was 14. The poor didn't do well during the depression. And many of the rich did not do well either.
 
pip48 said:
My parents lived through the depression and they were poor, and it affected them for the rest of their lives. My parents knew what going hungry was. I mean really going hungry, not milk on credit, no milk! My mother tells the story of when her father was sick and she had no money for a doctor. Her mother was dead and she was 14. The poor didn't do well during the depression. And many of the rich did not do well either.
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Well, my mother, a white woman, was farmed out to work on her uncles farm. She picked cotton along side his ”colored” workers. They got paid, she got room and board. Her dad had died. Her mother farmed out the older children, as was common. (They did not have credit cards in the old days.)

Life was hard then. It’s hard now. Lots of children don't have milk and are going hungry now.
 
Aneeda72 said:
Well, my mother, a white woman, was farmed out to work on her uncles farm. She picked cotton along side his ”colored” workers. They got paid, she got room and board. Her dad had died. Her mother farmed out the older children, as was common. (They did not have credit cards in the old days.)

Life was hard then. It’s hard now. Lots of children don't have milk and are going hungry now.
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My mother chopped cotton in the fields also, to buy herself a pair of school so she could continue to go to school. You had to have shoes to go to school. what we are living through is bad in a different way. But sending you children off to war is also horrific. I lost a lost friends that I went to school with in the Vietnam was. I brother in law came home, but was never the same. All those things were a lot to live through. My father fought in WWII, my uncle in Korea..........horrible things.
 
This pandemic is a Nuisance for most of the people. Events in the past were substantially more dangerous.

Perhaps the most dangerous event I personally sat through was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Few people realize just how close we came to an all out Nuclear War. We had every available aircraft loaded with a Nuke, and lined up on the runway/taxiways ready to launch on what would have been a one way flight for the pilots. We had all written what we thought might be our last letter home....and hoped that there would be someone left to read it. Had the aircraft launched, and the missiles fired, much of the Earth would have been uninhabitable for the few who survived. We were within minutes of "launch" when word came through that the Russian fleet had turned around.

A couple of days later, when the base officially "stood down", the beer sales in Germany went sky high.
 
The difference between then and now is that there were no laws forbidding people from living their lives so they had good times in their own way. They could work, they could gather together and have dinner with friends and all their family members. They could go to church. They had OUTLETS.

I feel on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a word I never fully understood before. I have no life in my state. NONE. ZERO. I'm alive in a grave here. I'm not the just stay at home and do nothing type.

One of my friends that I mentioned here before who actually moved out of my state to TN because he could no longer work here and survive due to restrictions for Covid is doing great! He's in the performing arts and he's back to work. He's fulfilled, he's doing what he loves and he's happy! He was smart to leave the state. It's a huge change but when your sanity and livelihood are on the line, what else can you do.
 
Maybe we don't have it so bad

We don't, but we don't know it, or care to
Many folks endured back then
They were used to doing
Doing whiteout
Making do

Now?

A good lot of us has never done without
Luxuries back then, have become necessities
If you can't buy it, get it on time

Our offspring are not much better off in the doing without dept

Folks, that have always had, become different
Hunger does that
Not having certain foods do that
Not having your phone charged can do that

There's no worse element in society than the haves becoming the have nots
 

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