The Good Old Days

Most people, the older they get, eventually say something about the “good old days” or how they miss the way things use to be. Or maybe they’ll make some scholarly comment about how society has deteriorated. But I wonder: would you really like to have things be the way they were? I doubt it.

Consider this: Would you rather live in a world with no polio vaccine? No washing machines? No Amber Alert? No digital cameras? No weather radar? No ball point pens? Would you rather live in a time when most people were illiterate? Women couldn’t vote? Slavery was accepted in America? You could likely die from a broken leg? An indoor toilet had to be emptied by hand?

I’ll admit I wish more food was homemade, more things were fixed instead of replaced, news wasn’t so instant, and no one was emailing me asking me to buy Viagra. But the advances made in health, sanitation, education, and safety are hard to let go. Still, there must be something deeper that makes people yearn for simpler times. We all are sensitive to the depravity of society. But the truth is that there have always been rapists and murderers. There will always be thieves and con artists. Eliminating television, the Internet, and fast food won’t make child molesters and prostitutes disappear. Modern life did not create human depravity.

And as for those that say modern life makes our own depravity worse, I disagree. It does magnify it so that we are aware of so much of the evil in the world. But even the little I know about history shows me that evil is nothing new. It's even true that some evil has been stopped in modern times. But evil is like water, it will find any little crack to come dripping out.

Since evil is not something that we as men will completely eradicate, we can only fight it - lest we be overcome - and move on. To move on to the future, we must let go of some of the piquancy of the past. However, we should embrace new advances with hesitancy. Not every new thing is better than what it replaces.