Even though you are told to think this everyday, we are not living the worst time in our nation’s history.

Someone had to say it…

[I didn’t make it to Sakuracon this weekend. I ended up spending closing the bar on Friday night because it was busy for most of the day. This lead to a late start Saturday morning. Because you people won’t come work for me, I had a full bevy of tasks planned for the weekend which also cut into my anime-shopping time. On top of that, my knee is rather swollen again – when that happens I try to keep off of it for a bit… anyone that has been to ‘cons knows that walking is the main requirement for attendance, followed by queuing for hours. The fact that I had time to consider all of these things – attending a show about animation, being employed, having free time to be at a bar, and then reflect over it all – says a lot about the quality of my right now…. and quite possibly, the quality of life in the states right now.]

While I stopped for lunch, my mind wandered while I was reading about the disasters of past software projects in Dreaming In Code… maybe it was a sort of mini-epiphany. A brief moment of clarity, while gnashing on a fry… or just brain-influencing gas. Hard to say for sure.

Nothing that we’re living today is any worse than what our ancestors have lived through before – we are just more aware of events than they were.

Stop rolling your eyes at me. The problems are pretty much the same – it’s just the parameters that keep changing (or in most cases just keep getting more advanced.) The term you’re looking for here is “raising the bar” – for better or worse is based on opinion…

Work. The jobs certainly have changed but we’ve battled employment and unemployment from medieval times… colonial farmers worked from morning to night in the fields. Industrial workers in factories, the same amount of time. During the Wars, industry didn’t stop at nightfall and worked through to morning. Since the Wars, our 9-5 workday is anything but nine to five. So what’s the new thing here? Unemployment will always ebb and flow; it’s the nature of our society’s ideology. McJobs will always be available and rife with complaints and scorn. People will still try to beat the system and get paid for not working. It’s a common – dare I say timeless? – tale.

Leisure. Is it weird, sad, or simply amusing that Playboy in the 70’s was treated with the same contempt, scorn and pious views that a paper from Galileo would have when it was written? Corruption of the mind is a funny thing… what is trash today can be historical fodder of tomorrow. What is literature today could have been a controversial and vulgar work from yesterday. Affairs? Been going on since biblical times. Divorce? See the Protestant Reformation started in 1521 and what followed in England. Do you honestly think that there wasn’t a Lindsay Lohan in the 1920s? 1850’s? Do you think that people didn’t enjoy sex in the 1500’s as much as we enjoy it now? Were breasts invented in 1921? Even the bible has Mary Magdalene. Again, the issues we hear about today are not new – they are just magnified.

Drugs and Alcohol. Where to start on this one… did you know Sears once sold cocaine through their catalog as recent as 1900? Alcohol had it’s prohibition; how did that get passed? Oh, right, a majority of the people pushed for it (supported by both Democrat and Republican parties, in fact) and got it through… the substances may have changed but the the problems are exactly the same. Some of the more addictive substances are legal (tobacco) and some of the less addictive substances are illegal (cannabis)… people are feeling the same amount of indignant feeling now as they did from 1920-1933… probably less – we never had the right to pot to have had it taken away. But even so, what does it say that someone can fight for our country at 18 and not drink a beer until three years later? Same problem, new parameters.

Gas Prices. I am old enough to remember the gas shortages in the 1970s. I can honestly say that it was far worse than what we’re seeing now with gas prices. Are prices at an all time high? Yes, of course, duh. Given the increase of wages and the general rise of value in goods in the US, are gas prices now more in line with where our economy is than ever before? Probably. The simple fact that you can get gas is what’s important here. When prices shot up in the 70’s it was due to shortages. As in you couldn’t get it no matter how much you spent, shortage… sorta like being a corn farmer in olden times: consider the differences between no one wanting to buy your corn vs all of your corn dying… and the fact that companies are looking to gasoline alternatives? Far better today than 1976.

Education. Ever hear of the dunce cap? Used for students that misbehaved. Schools have always had students that didn’t care about learning… are schools worse today than they used to be? Yes, of course, duh. In fact, I think this is the best example of how a core problem is the same problem even if the bar has been raised. There have always been bullies. There have always been schoolyard fights. There have always been weapons in school – or do you think that students never brought a knife or slingshot to class throughout the years? But now everything is magnified… and so is the schooling. Completing grade school was once considered educated. Then it was high school. Then it was college. What is it now? Masters? Ph.D.? Schooling went from a one room 2 hour affair – often between farming chores – for six years to a 6-8 hour job for 16 years with social activities built into the whole thing.

War. Always been there. Will always be there. Human nature, sorry. This Iraq bit is nothing compared to what history has throw at us. Try growing up with the USSR hovering with world-destroying nukes on the horizon. Or being told to get under your desk because of an air raid siren. Cuban Missile Crisis? Either of the World Wars, which we know the results of now – picture living four or five years straight with that kind of unrest. The Civil War? Oh hell, even the War of 1812. The list goes on… even the stint in Korea makes the Iraqi war look like a skirmish. It’s just that it’s the most recent – and propped up to be unpopular – so it’s the one you’re most aware of and therefore the most “important”.

Crime. Sorry to say this too, but it’s eternal. Once the very first law was written, there has been the very first criminal. The major difference today is that you hear a whole lot about the victim and the crime and the fallout and the made for TV movie, especially if something that’s deemed “sensational”.

There’s more things I could call out here, but these were the things that were on the top of my head. Enough to make a point in any case… and what is that point?

The Media.

There are two major things that have changed dramatically throughout the years… the Media’s role – or at least as they see their role – and the Media’s technology.

The change in role can be attributed to Woodward and Bernstein or possibly to Nixon. Either way, it was that event that helped change the role of the Media from “inform the public of news” to “inform the public of investigated news.” It looks like a subtile change, doesn’t it? But it’s not. It used to be that news would happen; the Media would report it. After the Watergate scandal, the Media took it upon themselves to research news for themselves. They started deciding what the news would be. They started digging into everything while screaming “the public has a right to know!” In truth, who is it that should decide what the public should and shouldn’t know? I.e. if I do something that I don’t want shared, I should have a right to not share it, right? I think so, but it doesn’t work that way if a reporter wants to share it. Whoever you think should control the flow of news, the Media has done this for you, for the last thirty years. What’s more, they learned very early on that sensational stories sell better than mundane stories. The more decadent, the more shock value, the more sin they can pack into a story, the better it does. “Exclusive” is an actual moneyed word. The Media needs viewers/readers; they need to sell well. Sales is what determines the news these days.

Add to that the advances of technology… I went from Wednesday to this morning without having read a blog. I didn’t die, although FeedDemon thought I did since i had a couple of thousand posts to sift through. Interesting fact: I didn’t learn anything that was that interesting when I finally read through the pile today. Even the day-to-day news viewing on TV isn’t giving me that much new info… but the problem is that the input comes from everywhere. On a normal day, you can’t get away from it no matter what you do.

When you take the kind of coverage – i.e. you go to pee in a restaurant and get a newscast above the urinal – and you have a source that loves to deliver sensational drama… yeeeesh. It’s a wonder we haven’t exploded from information overload or drowned in our own tears from the despair we’re told we’re supposed to feel… fear, uncertainty, and doubt: they sell Media stories very, very well.

And we’re just as much to blame, to be honest. If we didn’t like the news, we wouldn’t buy it. We like to see underdogs win. We like to see successful people fall. We like seeing other types of suffering if only to make our own feel not as bad. We are consuming what we’ve told our selling partners what we want to buy. Chalk it up to human nature, but it’s simply what’s going on out there… the whole notion of reality TV is part of this. Look at how long the Enquirer has been in print and they’ve only had one true stories a year, at the most.

Just remember: sometimes things are not as bad as you’re told to think it is.