My personal olden days would be the 1950s and ’60s, and they contained two wars, polio, cars without air conditioning and polyester leisure suits.
There were some good things about it. Pornography was underground, things happened more slowly, and even if they didn’t we had to wait for the morning newspaper to know.
My parents did not realize, however, that I needed a car seat that faced backward until I was 2. They let me play baseball without a helmet. And, because everyone except Gandhi had lousy nutrition, we ate candy and ice cream whenever we could. We did it without guilt.
Today, we know better about safety, things like cholesterol and all the conveniences we absolutely cannot do without.
There seems to me a time when the best things in life were not things at all.
When I was a child, we honed our hand-eye coordination with a basketball, a hoop and endless hours of playing “h-o-r-s-e.”
While today’s video games teach all sorts of skills, they don’t make you sweat. As kids, we played outside or rode in those cars without air conditioning or tried to sleep with the windows open and a fan going. We knew sweat.
We did not fear smallpox like my father did, nor did we know what it was like to read by gaslight. My dad did not yearn for those things, which were things from his “good old days.”
Some of the tools of this age sure are nifty and cool, as was said in my youth. I write this using a laptop computer. My doctoral dissertation was written on a manual Smith-Corona typewriter, and we were not allowed to erase. It had a spell-checker by the name of Betty who retyped and proofed my work.
Any research then was done by reading volumes in the library, while today Google and Yahoo do the work fast and cheap. Yahoo was a word then, used by the Rev. Jonathan Swift in “Gulliver’s Travels,” while the word Google had not been invented. Words change, except “cool,” which is still around.
In the 1960s, there were no cars made in Korea, no heart bypass surgery, phones had cords, and computers used punch cards and took up a whole room.
It would appear that both the old and new have their benefits and liabilities. The only problem is that the past is, well, the past.
• Mike McLellan can be contacted by calling and leaving a message at 830-4231 or e-mailing him at DrMikeM@sbcglobal.net.
If we went back to the past I'd need several backpacks to carry the same cellphone technology. And a small army to help me carry each of these backpacks.
CDMA, EDGE, 3G, 4G, 5G, WiMAX, Wi-Fi, Global Positioning, Tracking, GPS, Google Earth Maps, Bluetooth, Facebook, Twitter...
and just what we all needed, another lady to help men with (personalized) directions.
"Turn right on Naglee Road. - Your destination is on your right."
(BTW, whatever happened to AOL's "You got mail !!!")
I grew up in the 70's and 80's. We had telephones, TV, and air conditioning. This was the dawn of the video game era, and while we had a video game system, we also played outside all day until the streetlights came on, played HORSE, and all kinds of fun kid stuff that made us sweat.
When we wanted to talk to a friend, we went to their house and asked them out to play. Sometimes we used the phone, but it wasn't necessary. We talked TO each other face-to-face, or sometimes slipped notes into lockers. Human interaction was that- human to human. No cell phones, no texting, no emails, no IMing, and it was the rare person who owned a computer.
The farther back you go in time, the more people had to rely on each other. In today's world... it seems much less so. Maybe that is what defines "The Good Old Days" as such.
Perhaps part of the reason why many of us look back on the past with glowing reviews is because we were not only younger, but also because many of our love ones and friends from the past who are no longer with us. If we actually had the opportunity to return to the past we may discover that the good ole days were overrated in our memories, because we were successfully able to only recall the good times, and eliminate the bad.
My only complaint with the present compared to the past would be that people today don’t seem to have the patience that we once seem to have. I don’t know if that’s because people really have changed or I’m just slowing down as I age.
When I’m asked if I think life will be better in the future I always say yes, because I believe we will always be better than the past from the lessons they have taught us to become so.