Yesterday Might Have Been Better Today I felt like writing about some of the changes in society which have taken place since I was a lot younger. A person I know was presented with a dilemma, the employees where he worked were given a choice. They were told by management they could leave and get about six months pay and six months hospitalization and if they didn’t the company was probably going to let some people go and if they didn’t leave and accept the offer, they could be let go without any severance pay or hospitalization benefits. This person took the offer because he felt it was too risky to try and stay. Here is where it gets difficult. Unlike what used to happen in my day, which was going to job interviews, he has had to put in resumes and he lives in a high unemployment area. He is yet to hear back from anyone in several months of doing this. He is now trying unemployment agencies. It was so much better to be able to see people face to face when applying for a job and at least you felt you were being noticed. Today you don’t even know if anyone read your resume. It seems to me that can be very frustrating. In the old days many more people shopped at a local store. Sometimes people were short of money. Most of these stores had a notebook and the owner would put your name into it, the date and the amount you owed. When the bill was paid off, he would cross out the amount and mark it paid in front of you. I don’t know of any stores which do this anymore. The amazing thing is hardly anyone ever stuck the owner with the bill. Doing this was considered a very shameful act and people would go to any legal lengths to pay the bill even work an extra job. Most people in my day didn’t try to put people down. Of course, there would always be some malcontent who would do this but the majority of people were very conscious of others and their reputation. We didn’t have much money but we did have good reputations and mostly everyone wanted to keep it that way. Today there are people who go on social media and completely trash others and ruin reputations even if what they say isn’t true and they enjoy doing this. This is one of the problems with social media. Anyone can go on it and say anything they want even if it hurts others. I believe in free speech, but not slander. Something should be done about this, but I will leave that decision to the experts. Usually when we had discussions people had some facts, they weren’t just arguing out of ignorance. Today many of the facts are lacking in arguments. We see this on television every day. I won’t go into specifics, but there sure are a lot of people who don’t know what they are talking about which leads me to believe some do and are just plain lying. This is happening for many different reasons. Sometimes it is to protect someone, sometimes it is political and sometimes it is done for money. There are some who believe American culture completely changed after the late 1960s. They call this the end of the post war booming economy. I have to say I didn’t experience this booming economy and neither did the rest of us living in a poor section in Brooklyn, New York until the middle 1950s. I still did didn’t experience a booming economy when we moved to Queens, New York. I did know a couple of people who went to worked for IBM at the time and became very well off but they were the exception. In my day kids wanted to get out of the house and play games like baseball, football, tag and others. We had a great time and met actual people unlike what is happening today. We were far stronger than most today because you can’t get very strong sitting in a chair all day playing video games. I would guess there are far more loners today than in my day and this might be one of the reasons for all the violence which is happening. The games become real life to these people and killing becomes a fantasy. When we grew up, we moved out, got married and started our own lives, we didn’t live in mom’s basement growing old. I know we have a good economy today, but in some areas of the country things are so expensive children have to move away when they grow up or be able to command incredibly high salaries. There is a problem with this for many people today because they incur very high bills for education and most of them are not taking courses which will help them in a career. Saddled with this debt after they graduate it is back to the basement if they ever left. We seemed to be a lot happier in the old days. I think this was because we were having more fun. There were plenty of places to go to socially and meet members of the opposite sex. Today many complain there is no where to go, I hear this many times. Even the churches used to run dances. I wonder how many of them still do this today? There was just always somewhere to go and when the weekend came it was fun time. Being able to make contacts meant we all had a lot of friends. This started in early childhood and carried on through adult life. I still have friends from when I was a child and they are more like family to me than friends and any of us would do anything for the others. Many friendships today are short lived and you would be lucky to have lifelong friends unless you came from a small town and grew up with them. People say these are the best times to live in. Technology is the most advanced and at times does make our lives a little easier, but technology is a double edged sword. Sorry for using this trite saying, but it is true. While technology has made things easier in some ways, it is hurting us in others. It is hurting the health of many who just play computer games all day, it is hurting the mental health of the same people and soon virtual reality might replace going out at all. Some day an alien might land on this planet, look at our history and say those poor people, technology killed them.
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