Cherylmazana
Posts: 1151
Joined: 10/4/2007
Status: offline
|
I find it a little bit sad that your parents and grandparents don’t talk about the harder things of the past, that’s never a problem I have had, I have known people who lived through pandemics and stole lead off roofs to pay for a doctor to help their children, I have known soldiers who told of the horror of what they have been through, or as much as they thought I should hear. I have been told tales of sexual assault and thievery and moonlight flits in the night to escape the debt collectors. They were all told as tales of life and that life is never perfect but that life isn’t always nice.
But I could empathize with a small girl locked naked in a room and forced to scrub floors naked and embarrassed while those who should have looked after her laughed and watched. And I could feel anger and hate towards those who would create such places as Belson and what happened to those trapped inside. And I could laugh at the daring of the woman who hid behind a couch to pretend she wasn’t there when they came demanding money and then who slipped away in the night to start again elsewhere to repeat the cycle again, laugh and also be shocked at how she had the balls to lie and cheat so many with never a care.
I do not romanticize the past, the past was as things are now for some easy for others hard, and the lack of medical knowledge meant that many who would have lived to be old now didn’t then but people still lived to be 70 fairly often and even older. The main problem was infant mortality, dying in childbirth, and the diseases that regularly killed great swathes of the population. But any old churchyard will put lie to the belief that people always died young, and archeologists have found people living to their 70’s and older even in the Egyptian period.
And while I have only played on a farm with friends at holidays as a child even then I knew it was hard work, though for me the novelty made it fun. Hard manual work is still hard whether digging a hole 200 years ago or digging one now in a road by hand, and while modern machines make it easier to cultivate larger areas they don’t remove all the hard work, they just change the nature of it.
As for the harder life, the slums of London in the Victorian age or the ghettos of modern age, both seem to me to have similarities, there will always be those who have nothing, and there will always be those for whom there will never be enough.
But they knew about communities and banding together, today something only known in small rural areas but even that is rapidly vanishing as people buy “quaint” holiday homes in the country and so the communities die because for 50 weeks of the year the homes stand empty and the locals have been priced out of the market. Once you knew your neighbors, you grew up with them, they were there for all occasions good and bad now our families scatter across the country looking for work, even in the towns there were communities where everyone knew each other, now in a town you barely know your neighbors names, and the small villages and fishing towns only live for the summer holidays.
But maybe to our children this will be a golden age, who can tell.
Cheryl
|
RE: Gorean views on mortality? - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread