HOME | FUNNY ARTICLES | TOP NEWS REPORTS | SUBMIT
|
Mar. 6, 2010 I grew up in the fifties and at the time was under the impression that I was living in an age of tolerance and reason previously unknown. No longer were people put in prison for not paying their debts, nor were they executed for non capital offences. Slavery was illegal and so was child labour. Now I learn that my generation was in fact a cruel bunch of racist homophobic uncaring fascists. I reply that crime then as compared to that of today was practically non existent; to which my baby boomer friends answer, ‘but look at the cruelty of your system which routinely used capital punishment’. Well for starters it was only used only for capital offences and a murder was a great rarity filling the headlines for weeks if not months when it occurred. I would say that our present age is way more barbaric than that of the fifties where in some cities one murder a day is the norm, three or more on a week end hardly raising an eye brow. I suppose the thinking behind this goes something like ‘ but it is not done by the government and so not being officially sanctioned is not so bad’. Just goes to show how screwed the present day mind is –if your dead your dead no matter who killed you. Then we have the racism; wasn’t it so cruel and racist back then, what with’ Bwana’ lashing out at the poor black of yellow man every time he didn’t pick up the sedan chair or rickshaw properly. Well I was there at the time and can tell you that the poor black and yellow man used to give as good as they got. Sure we used racist epithets such as the word (now banned under pain of imprisonment) being the initials used to describe a wealthy oriental gentleman; but we too were called white devils and our ancestry called into to question. I don’t seem to remember many people suffering traumatic nervous breakdowns requiring years of legal proceedings and psychiatric treatment. But wasn’t the authoritarianism over bearing? I hear some of you asking. Coundn't the police stop you for no reason at all and ask for your I'd while asking all kinds of questions? Well I suppose you are right, they could and did on occasion. Why I remember being in an up scale part of the city wearing shabby clothes being stopped by two policemen. I was unshaven and unkempt as I was down on my luck and on my way to perform some type of casual work. I showed my ticket from the unemployment office and they immediately turned on their heels and walked away. Nowadays of course they cant do this kind of thing, the public now having to continually watch every one around them and still subject to the odd mugging-or worse.
However nils desperandum as the Romans used to say, things do seem to be getting better.The boomers are aging and a new generation is taking over, measures to deal with negative human instincts now back in vogue. After all, ensuring the survival of the system is hard wired into the human brain, the boomer phenomena a passing fad.
Read Mike Haran's essays on history at
http://www.geocities.com/manzikertca/
|
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
