A friend emailed me photos of glorious U.S. cityscapes from 100 years ago. The photo above is of my old stomping grounds of Atlantic City, in 1915.

The architecture is stunning, but the living seems problematic. In our haste to glorify the past, we seldom stop to think about the implications.

Put another way:  I’d like to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

• Little or no indoor plumbing.
• Unreliable transportation.
• Unpaved streets (I had enough of that growing up where I did).
• No penicillin.
• Few clothes. (All those beautiful clothes in the photos comprise about 1/3 of those people’s wardrobes.)
• Low wages, and little chance for upward mobility.
• Poor entertainment choices — no movies or recorded music or video gaming or virtual reality. In fact, no Monopoly yet either.
• Human flight not invented yet.
• No space travel or space exploration.
• Greatly reduced lifespan. (Average life expectancy for a male in California now: 78.33 years. In 1910: 48.4 years) Ouch!
• And — you’ll appreciate where I’m coming from here — no Internet.

I wouldn’t want to live in Narnia, either. But the illustrations can be just as fantastic.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2016 at 9:52 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.