[lit-ideas] Re: Didn't I tell you so?
- From: Andy <min.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 12:24:25 -0700 (PDT)
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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