[lit-ideas] Re: Didn't I tell you so?

I hear in this a hankering for the good old days.  Good old days, like Charles 
Dickens writes about.  The good old days were a fantasy.  Mostly they were a 
horror except in the remembering.  Note the earlier thread on English schools.  
If anything, we're better now than ever in history because [insert litany about 
improved attitudes and sometimes behaviors toward incipient humans, and for 
that matter minorities and women].  
   
  In the good old days, among a lot of other things, the "downstairs" of 
upstairs/downstairs in England worked 7 days a week from 6:00 a.m. to midnight. 
 They got half a Sunday a year off (a year).  And that's only the less bad 
part.  Television didn't create any of that.  Television only makes bad stuff 
more visible, which is a step in the right direction.  Television also 
sensationalizes, but so did the Police Gazette and a lot of other 
pre-television media.
   
  The underlying cause of the "human condition" is the way humans are 
manufactured.  It always has been.  Television is easier to blame, but for 
improving humanity, it's a nonstarter.
   
  For Paul, tracking children is fine if it's really in the interests of the 
child, but often it has nothing to do with the child.  I was once friends with 
a professional originally from England, who was in fact from the English lower 
classes.  Ordinarily he would have been tracked into a blue collar trade.  By 
sheer luck (I don't remember the details) he wound up on a different track and 
became a professional.  There is NOTHING wrong with blue collar trades.  The 
point is, he would have been forced into it like it or not because of his place 
in society.  That's what wrong with tracking.
   
   
   
  

Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
  
Well said! Perhaps one of the underlying causes is the 
absence of any real community anywhere. The only thing 
people have in common today is TV. TV has become our 
national/global ersatz community.


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