The Born Loser by Art and Chip Sansom for June 12, 2014

Yikes!

generally speaking…..most things seemed better when one was younger anyway…no matter what…

It’s nothing to do with anything actually getting worse. (Imagine the 14th century headline, if there were such.) The old days always feel like the good old days. Well, to most. Not the ones that suffered that era’s particular horrors personally. Were the 50’s good old days. Sure, in exactly the way today will seem the good old days to our kids. But there was grotesque racial oppression, polio, Korea, McCarthy blacklists, the Congo, Indochina, almost total oblivion of child sexual abuse (meaning it was rampant and never revealed), DDT, and a slew of other very bad things indeed that have escaped your memory, just as much of today will escape you kids’. Don’t tell me today is worse. For every point you make, I can equal and probably top it from my youth. And the farther we go back, the worse the examples will be.

It doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with it. Nor does it mean I will enthusiastically adopt all the behavior in fashion today. But I wouldn’t have done so for the norms of my grandfather’s time, either.

And, yes. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we were waking up full of youth. Today is no different than yesterday. It’s just different in detail. In many fundamental ways, things are remarkably better today than ever before. If you can’t work that out, you’re just choosing to be miserable – and, sadly, probably enjoying it.

OUCH!!

Once in awhile, Gladys is right.