Sunday, February 6, 2011

People Are Changing Worldwide

I don't like many of the changes in people worldwide. Maybe that's because I was born in 1948. When I was growing up I knew people who were born as far back  as 1860 because someone born in the 1860s would only be in their 90s in the 1950s. So, the diversity of ways of seeing things was very complex then as now but just in sort of a completely different way than now.

It immediately makes a person know that they are dealing with something very different than now when, for example a grandmother or grandfather says something like, "I didn't have electricity anywhere I lived until I was in my 20s." And beyond that, "I lived in the country and came out west in a covered wagon over the Oregon Trail. Or "I took the train from New York to San Francisco with my parents no long after it was just finished being built coast to coast. Since the railroad was built between the East Coast and San Francisco between 1863 and 1869  there were people I talked to as a child who had this early experience as well. Or, we traveled only by Horse and wagon or walking and had oil lamps at home and went to gather water in a bucket from the well every morning before breakfast and before we went to school.

So, the biggest difference I think between people when I was growing up was there was much more a consciousness of self sufficiency. (That in an emergency one could do anything necessary to survive). I find this is much less true today, especially among people who live in large cities. However, this is still true of many people who grow up on farms taking care of animals and farming and repairing fences and surviving blizzards or tornadoes remotely All across America and the world.

There was no addiction to Television or personal computers or remote telephones or cell phones. So if you talked to someone on the phone it had to have a line all the way from your phone to wherever you wanted to talk on earth. And it was expensive to make phone calls (not like now at all). So you would spend as little time on the phone as possible unless it was a (Local call) which meant your city or county(whatever local meant then). Now, with cell phones in the same cell company local can be nationwide, which is a real switch from the 1950s.

So, I feel the real danger today is addiction or co-dependence with technology and over specialization. So, I see these two things as potentially destroying people's lives in real emergencies.

In the 1950s boredom was something everyone was used to so we would just daydream to deal with it once we were bored enough. But now with technology often people never ever even learn to think their own thoughts or have a useful opinion about anything which I see as really crazy and potentially life threatening to mankind both individually and collectively. The reason for this is that for thousands of years life has been a "Do or Die" thing. And it hasn't changed much for thousands of years. So when people think it has changed and that it is better that is actually an illusion that people choose to believe. The veneer of civilization and culture is very thin and likely will get even thinner now that global climate change(or whatever you choose to call it) is presently preventing the human race from growing enough food to feed everyone on the planet. (or more precisely, enough food can be grown but then it would be too expensive for the poorest humans on the planet to ever buy. This is quite serious and grows more serious every year and actually is the real root cause of the revolutions in the middle east: Not enough food. And I think you will see more nations worldwide go to revolution in the next few years because of the food shortage of grains worldwide.

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