In the aftermath of celebrating "Labor Day", I'd like to give you a gift.
It's the gift of Perspective.It's easy to bemoan our fates at times, and think we've got it really hard when troubles come our way. I do it too. High gas prices, unsure markets, rising unemployment rates, seemingly unresponsive government types trying to cram their agendas down our throats.
It's useful, though, to back away and see that struggling isn't a unique condition for us as human beings. It's often our natural state.
What's telling is how we react to those difficulties. That's how our characters are measured, as individuals and as a Nation.
I put this video slideshow together a while back because the subject matter interested me. I uploaded it to Youtube and then promptly forgot about it. I happened to notice today that its had around 3500 views.... which is pretty cool since I don't think I've ever linked to it anywhere. Watch it and see if it makes your modern day misery seem a little puny by comparison. I know it did mine.
Some people watch the video and see a condemnation of Capitalism, and a cry in favor of Socialism.... I don't see that at all. The generation that followed them had it better. The next generation had it better still. That's how its supposed to work, you know.
Each generation building on the one that came before, not robbing from the next one.
I see the faces in the video and wonder at their resilience, their grit, and their spirit. I'm thankful to have come from people like this, and I hope I do their memory justice in the way I live my life. I'm thankful for their sacrifices and the lessons their lives teach me.
Having a glimpse into their lives certainly makes me look at my own in a different perspective.
5 comments:
Perspective. The difference in expectations and standard of living is amazing.
I loved listening to my grandparents tell about their lives and especially about their childhoods. I convinced one of my grandmothers to write down a bunch of stories about her childhood. I have lost the originals but I have copies. I also love listening to my parents talk about their childhoods.
At our farms (purchase and/or traded for by my grandfather before WWII) my dad and I found a couple of interesting old items that also give some perspective on our standard of living compared to that of a generation or more ago.
The first item is an old hoe head. You might not notice if you didn't look closely but the original blade had been used and sharpened completely away and someone had welded a flat piece of metal onto it and sharpened it so they could keep using the hoe. The hoe was used so much that the blade that was added was almost sharpened away. Today almost nobody will wear out a hoe and if anyone wore one out or broke it they would throw it away and buy another.
The second item we think was a home made garden or flower duster. It was originally a steel can about the size of a 3 pound coffee can. Some enterprising individual had spent a lot of time using a tool (maybe an ice pick?) to punch holes through the sides and bottom of the can from the inside. Thousands of holes over every square inch so that it looks like a very fine cheese grader. We aren't sure it was a duster but we can't think of any other use for it.
There is also a abandoned farm house that my grandfather used to let farm hands and their families live in as part of their compensation. I remember the last people still lived in it about 1975. There was no hot and cold running water. There was/is a cistern in the back yard. They had a small pump that would bring the water up and ran it through a pipe above the ground through a hole in the wall of the kitchen. I guess they had to be careful to drain that pipe in cold weather. They had an old claw foot tub in the bathroom and when they took a bath they heated water on the stove in the kitchen and carried it to the tub. The pipe and cistern are still there. This was in the 1970s in America.
My grandfather is not certified, but an architect by trade. He has built more houses and buildings in draft and form than most people will visit in thier lives. He has been building houses and buildings since he was six years old (to a lesser degree of course) and this was his full time "job" since he was eleven.
I can't even fathom this, looking at my six year old.
I can't fathom the time & the stregth required to do that, given the ample food at my table, and the bennifits to working in this day and age with vacation pay, required days off, over time and in a lot of companies, health benifits.
It was a whole different world.
That's one heck of a lot of perspective. It would be interesting to add what had changed between 1810 and 1910:
- Slavery outlawed
- Universal Male suffrage, with women's right to vote imminent
- The closing of the frontier
- Industrialization
- Shift from immigration almost solely from England and Germany to include Ireland, Italy, Quebec, Greece, etc, and the social shifts that went with it
Great post
Makes me think about when I was in Mexico a few years ago. A friend of mine has family that live in the mountains in central Mexico.The people in the area are very poor with no electric,plumbing or modern conviences that we take for granted. The thing that suprised the the most is as a community they seemed happier then most people here. They had a strong sence of family and community that I have never experiences before or after that visit. Everyone watched out for each other and I was treated like one of the family. I am not saying I would want to live the way they have to live, but I did learn a lot about life from the experience. Nice post
Paladin, thank you for following my blog. My boys and I just enjoyed that low flyover. Yikes!!!!
And your BOB kit is amazing. I want to be your friend when all HELL breaks loose, lol.
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