The "Good Old Days?" Well, not so much, really.

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49. There are some scholars who posit . . .

. . . That the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden represents the human yearning for an imagined simpler time of ease and comfort. It has also been argued that theories of a Golden Age of Matriarchy when women ruled and humans lived in harmony and with justice are just nostalgic longings for when we were young children and our mothers provided for us and protected us and our problems were easy to resolve.

Jean Auel's Earth's Children series features a passage in which one of the characters dreams of their Earth Mother Deity no longer providing for their needs directly which is seen as an allegory for humanity moving from hunting/gathering to farming.

Change is the only constant in the Universe and memory is mutable. Things ARE a lot better for a great many people nowadays, but we have a social communication structure based on complaining. That's not necessarily bad; acknowledging when something is wrong is the first step towards efforts to improve it. The problem is that some people are adept at magnifying those complaints and laying the blame with the wrong parties.

One of the things that pisses me off is the framing of poverty as a moral deficiency on the part of the poor and suggestions that they are destroying our society or way of life or whatever. Poor people aren't ruining the world! They don't have the power to do anything of the kind! Most of them are expending every inner resolve they have on just surviving. And some people run the limits of their stength and fall apart.

People shouldn't have to be towering heroes of the Human Spirit just to survive. Most of us aren't. We're just humans, trying to get by. But the only people who can be forgiven for just "being human" are the Right-Wing Mouthpieces who claim to speak for God when it comes to telling the rest of us how to live our lives.

(I dare say that I have gone off topic. Allow me to return.)

Earlier today, I ran water from different faucets in my home and I flushed away unmentionable materials with the simple push of a lever. When my late father was a boy-- living in a major US city-- they still used chamber pots and had to go to publicly-operated facilities to bathe.

Things. Are. Better. Now. . . And things are different-- finding flexibility to meet new challenges makes more sense than trying to turn back the clock to a world none of us can remember with any objectivity anyway.