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[LisaM]

66. None of us has ever seen "normal".

There are still plenty of people around who remember the Depression and WWII. Those were not normal times. The 50s were marred by the threat of "the Bomb" and tightened belts all through Europe, and the beginning of the Iron Curtain and the Vietnam War. The 60s were complete turmoil as the war slogged on and students (male students subject to the draft) started vehemently protesting. The 70s continued that battle, then there was Watergate and the revolution in Iran. The 80s were marked by horrific corporate greed and the unchecked power grabs associated therewith by Reagan and Thatcher, along with a huge rise in the influence of fundamentalist religion worldwide. Europe was subject to numerous terror threats. There were hijackings all over. Ethiopia went through a massive famine, and people were finally waking up to the injustice of apartheid. I could go on, but you get the drift.

It's a punch in the gut to hear someone whine about how hard things are now when even recent history is so unsettled. I didn't even go back to WWI, the Spanish flu pandemic, and the Panic of 1919, and the Wall Street crash and they're not that far away.

I am a history buff and I can tell you that the periods of time it's most difficult to get information about are the periods of relative calm and prosperity. Would that we lived in such times, but we don't. That's why the history section in book stores and libraries slant so heavily to the Civil War and WWII. The most recent trends are to focus on one year (1491! 1619!) and to scold people now for events from hundreds of years ago, but that's divisive and unproductive.

Okay, climbing off the "We're Not Unique" soapbox.