One of the smartest, coolest guys I ever knew was my late father. He was with us at least 20 years more than he would have been in the "good old days," thanks to a couple of by-pass surgeries. In fact after the first one, he coined the phrase, "the good old days were not that good."
Just watching the recent media retrospective on the 40th anniversary of the King assasination, proves Dad's prophetic words. Every time I see all that media footage, I am stunned over how just a few decades ago, blacks could not use the same restrooms or drinking fountains as whites or sit in the front of the bus, etc. Were those the good old days? Hell no.
And on the medical front, I've already mentioned Dad's "borrowed days" as he called them. But thanks to medical science, I still have the joy of my wife, Eileen. Her privacy is important, so suffice it to say that if she had faced 40 years ago what she faced only a few years ago, she would not be here with me now. Needless to say, the good old days are not that appealing to us!
I could go on and on... But in closing, in my mind, the best argument against the good old days is the advance in computers and the Internet. The change in our lives as a result of them is literally amazing. Every time I see a "not-that-old" movie like "All the President's Men" and see NO COMPUTERS, and people typing on IBM Selectric typewriters (remember how cool we all thought those were), I am so grateful for modern word processing. (I remember projects I had to submit in law school [1966-1969] using correction tape, and carbon copies, which were so unforgiving and time consuming that one's creative juices were regrettably, but inevitably, stunted.)
The impetus for this post came from reading a great post from Micheal Lally in his blog today. He hits the nail right on the head. It's so cool that a prospective techno Luddite has evolved into a top-notch blogger who now routinely uses all the power and magic of the ether!
Ain't it cool?
T.
1 comment:
Hey Dad,
Thanks for this post. I was thinking about it last night. I just finished watching the final part of the John Adams mini-series on HBO (which was great, going to read the book next) and I thought that the series did a good job at protraying what it was like to live in the late 1700s and early 1800s. No electricity, no cars, no email or anything.
The 2 things that really made me think were the quality of medicine and transportation back then. When John Adam's daughter got breast cancer, they had not technology to pinpoint where the tumor was, and the only solution was to take a huge knife and cut it out, with no sedatives or painkillers or anything for the patient. Grusome indeed.
The second that your blog made me think about was the transportation. When John Adams had to travel to France to ask for military aid for the revolution, he had to take a boat across the Atlantic, which god knows took how long. And then communication was a difficult process, with letters often taking weeks or months to reach its destination.
There were so many other things in this mini-series that were fascinating to me (e.g. lack of dental care, etc.), that of course I knew about, but never really thought about. So yes, I agree with your blog. We are very fortunate and blessed to live in these times with this technology. Not only to live in these times, but to be fortunate and lucky enough to live in this country with all of its amenities and freedoms.
Love,
Jesse
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