Removed by mod
You can be angry, but being angry at things out of your control is not good for you.
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
Ursula K. LeGuin
There’s little that’s legitimately out of your control. Of course, I don’t mean 1 person can topple Capitalism or anything, but 1 person can set up a union, join a protest, or set up a co-operative farm, educate others, or make meaningful grassroots change.
1 person can make a big difference in the lives of the people around them.
One person can do something, but one person can’t do everything. If you are already running a farm co-op, leading a union, or so on, you simply don’t have the time to address the hundred other things you can see in the news in a single day.
Removed by mod
It is, because nobody is willing to do what’s actually necessary. People talking about voting and protesting, that doesn’t do or mean shit.
Now if you set up the gallows and the BBQ to cook up the rich, I’m all for it and ready to help. That’s how you gonna get any real change.
Yeah voting is largely useless. But the gallows don’t happen without a revolution, which doesn’t happen without people getting in the streets (protest).
I don’t think that was the point of the post.
It was more “Never fall for a ‘things were good back then’ narrative because actually shit sucked even more in the past”
aright cool
Back in my day we worked 28 hours a day and didnt complain!!
(They put cocaine in coca cola and lead in the water)
…and could afford houses and food
But now I sound like I’m wearing the same rose-tinted glasses as the folks I was making fun of
And the… non-WASPs knew their place. They loved it too in fact!
(I’m paraphrasing some actual things that actual people have actually said about the good old days (but I can’t remember their actual euphemisms (dysphemisms) for non-WASPs))
I’m reading The Way We Never Were and it’s amazing how much we get wrong about the good old days.
There’s a reason most historical fiction focuses on nobles and land-owners. You can tell interesting stories about them, and modern people can sort-of relate to their lifestyles. If you told stories about the common people, modern people wouldn’t be able to focus on the story, and would get distracted by how brutal and awful their day-to-day lives were.
Now fairy tales, that’s where the brutality comes in. Ever heard of “The Death of the Little Hen” collected by the Grimm brothers? The last line is, I kid you not, “and then everyone was dead”. Gotta get those kiddos used to pandemics and family sized tombstones.
Not really
You tell stories of people who could have it recorded
In the past everything was better, even the future.
Karl Valentin
Remember, they used to prescribe real drugs instead of placebo bullshit. Those were the good old days.
Yeah nothing wrong with a bit of prescription mercury to clear up the old syphilis
I mean my wife sure is more productive around the house on amphetamines and morphine, and my kids sure are easier to deal with at bedtime when they take their heroin.
Amphetamine and morphine is my love language. Call me.
That’s the spirit! You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.
Hawaii was great until the haoles fucked it up. So was a lot of pre colombian america. And parts of pre colonization africa.
Just because Europe was shit doesn’t mean it was shit everywhere. Europe is pretty unique in that it has been total warring itself for over 2000 years straight. The streak ended in world war 2, but goes back to the bronze age.
Could those places I listed be improved by modern medicine and trains? Sure. Doesnt mean they were terrible.
Those areas are also wildly romanticized. Let’s not forget that one of the ways that some Europeans got established was by trading guns to indigenous people so they could go off and kill other indigenous people for their land.
“But I read a book written by one of the few people who were privileged enough to read and write, and things didn’t seem so bad!”
The Amazon reviews are really bad. If anyone is looking for a book with this same idea, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker is really great.
Was just having a conversation recently on whether things have always been this close to a complete existential crisis for humans or is the current global situation unique. Most people felt like things have always been bad but I still feel like, with everything going on in terms of global conflicts and climate change, things are uniquely, complexly and extremely bad on a global scale compared to the past.
things are uniquely, complexly and extremely bad on a global scale compared to the past
I’m with you. But also, has every generation said exactly this?
Yeah, I imagine a lot of people alive during the world wars thought things were going to collapse any second as well. But I just feel the added background anxiety of the status quo causing the Earth to heat up catastrophically but slow enough to be ignored adds a novel layer of messed up to everything.
And yet, life is called a gift.
“Gift” is a German word that means poison
And Norwegian!
Life seems like the result of such an unlikely complex Rube Goldberg machine where everything was just right to let life start then survive for a very long time. Plus we are made of various elements that had to be created in some of the universe’s biggest explosions.
It seems then that life should be something to be cherished while we briefly have it. I try to do just that.
…then we get to watch people around the world working hard to make life worse for those around them.
Yeah how’s that return policy on white elephants going
Curses can be gifts
It’s true, the past sucked even more than now, and now sucks too, but their clothes were prettier–Modern people are smart and everybody in the past was dumb.
All that religion and mysticism. All that stuff about gods, little people, spirits, elves, afterlife, etc. Stuff that all the smart people talked about for thousands of years.
It’s all wrong. They were all just dumb.
Does that count as romanticizing too?
