The Good Old Days

Good evening again and welcome to television term three. Yes!! Isn’t it amazing? And they said I wouldn’t last. So much for their opinion. I’m sure you’d like to know the subjects we’ll be touching on this term. Well, I’ll tell you. We look at the little differences between males and females. I’m sure you can think of at least one or two. Mmm maybe you can’t… We’ll also delve into class personalities with an interview program. I will present a Pot Pourri of this and that. Don’t they just love to play around with that French phrase Pot Pourri? No it isn’t a collection of dead petals! It’s a mixed bag of Television brilliance! Also in this term, I’ll return to the valuable basics. The grist to the presenter’s talent mill. I’ll also look at the true values of life, as well as what I see as delightful or dull. I’ll also question why we do things as we do. But tonight I’ll examine the “good old days” or were they? Here goes!

Surely anyone who looks back on some distant time in history as being better than today must be contradicting the basic laws of evolution, which are that the forces of nature and the very nature of living things is in a constant state of positive feedback change – that is if something is working, then it is encouraged and promoted, and if it is failing or not working as well as it could, it is discarded through natural selection, or at least improved upon over thousands of years of genetic mutations. Of course along the way there are times that thing don’t look too good form one perspective or another, but in general, in the bigger picture, things always get better, or at least they do in nature… man is a different story, and that is really what we are discussing tonight. The human perspective.

My personal opinion is that the notion of “the good old days” is used by people who, like the dinosaur, or the roman empire become superseded, inefficient, useless, and in their despair at the evolutionary step they are caught up in, like to try to hang on to what once was, and see it as some kind of halcyon day where all was well. I think we all are guilty of this kind of thinking, because for one, we have pleasant memories of times we once knew, and two, evolution is not a painless process. Dinosaurs had to die to make way for mammals and eventually humans, blacksmiths had to go out of business to make way for tyre fitting services, mechanical cash registers that went k-ching and popped up the price, on little pointy metal tags made way for electronic versions, drummers lost their jobs to drum machines, and now we find nationalistic attitudes and politics fighting the inevitable approach of the global community.

So here we all stand, among the whirlwinds of change, thinking fondly back to pockets of calm and serenity in our lives, the days when it was safe to walk the streets, the days when you could go sunbaking all summer and get yourself a great tan, the days when petrol stations had attendants who filled your tank, wiped your windshield and checked your oil, the days when you could get a house for $15,000 a car for $1,500 and a hamburger for 15 cents. The days when music was real music played by musicians who knew how to sing and play. The days when everybody had two parents who lived together.

And then there are the warm feelings we get inside for those quaint old ways, like operator connected telephone calls, door to door vacuum cleaner salesmen, cars you had to crank, or lawnmowers you had to wrap a piece of rope around and pull to get started. TV’s that used to slowly shrink to a tiny dot when you turned them off. Businesses that had people answering the phone for them instead of machines.

My life is filled with memories of “the good old days” but I also know that in many other ways these days were not so good, and I appreciate the amazing things that are around now the were not even dreamed of back then. Sure I get annoyed using touch-tone answering services, but I do appreciate being able to email people all around the world and even chat to them free of charge. It seems that evolution and progress is a huge mixed bag of plusses and minuses. One day we will look back on today as being a Good Old day, but we will also thank our lucky stars for the improvements that I’m sure will come our way as this world evolves exponentially into the future, with technology, information exchange and increased awareness feeding back on itself to provide more and more solutions to age old problems.

The best way to highlight these changes and show “the good old days” for what they really were, is to go back a hundred years or so, to see just how much things do change over time, and ask ourselves “was it really so good in the past?”

Imagine a time when there was no telephone, no TV, no radio, no aeroplanes, no cars even… it wasn’t that long ago. My grandparents lived in this time, the 1800’s. Amazing as it sounds, I am only two generations away from a completely different world. So what did people do back then with so little technology? Were they just footloose and fancy free, singing gay ditties in the evening by the fireside with lute and a flute? Were their aspirations so simple that they rejoiced in the acquiring of a new cupboard the way we might if we won a round-the-world holiday?

I think life would have been pretty damn hard. Cold in winter, stifling in summer, working from dawn til dusk with hand implements, scraping together money to buy basic necessities. And if you got sick… bad luck. No antibiotics, no anaesthetic, the doctors didn’t even have a basic understanding of the workings of the human body. My great grandmother had an accident at work, when a nail got stuck in her leg, and it just went gangrenous and they had to cut her leg off. With no anaesthetic. Good old days? I think not.

Tonight I have invited two guests with me to talk about their views on the good old days. Is life getting better in time? Are we better off now than we ever were, or are we perhaps losing some things that are actually better, and replacing them with things that may be more economically viable, but don’t actually improve our lives in any real way?

Questions:

What do you remember in your past that makes you think of “the good old days”
Cheaper things? More free time?
What is it about today that is so bad?
Would you like to have lived in the 1800’s, before technology really started evolving?
Wouldn’t life have been better with less pollution, traffic, garbage, noise?
What about all the horse manure and smell of coal fires?
What about promiscuity? Do you think it was better in Victorian times, when table legs were covered over with drapes, because naked tables were considered abhorrently obscene?
What do you think we will look back on about today and remember as The Good Old days?
Do you think it is possible that we have actually begun going backwards? That while technology and economics are forging ahead, the human experience of life is actually getting degraded? Sure we can all take better holidays, live in more comfortable surroundings, but how happy are we?
Were we ever that happy? Are we all waiting for some kind of salvation to drag us out of our unhappiness?

And there we have the Good Old Days…. What do you think? Would we have been better off then? You know my feelings. Next week, I return with lesson number two of term three, when I present a bit of this and that, with the old Pot Pouree recipe. I look forward to your company. Until then this is Stefan Sojka, wishing you a pleasant week. Bye!!