Find your reminder to be optimistic

You see this picture on the left? Clearly, they are lemons. Right? Life, if judged by previous standards and over 5000 years of recorded history, will give us a lot of lemons.  A LOT.  A lot of heartaches, a lot of failures, a lot of headaches and a lot of stress.  That seems to be the human condition, and we have been trying to find a way to fight against it for a long, long time.  I don’t foresee it getting instantly better in a heartbeat or changing overnight.  Having said that, we should recognize that life today, for a lot of people, is infinitely better than it would have been just 200 years ago or even 100 years ago.  For instance, in 1925 most people in the United States were illiterate.  Over 70% of the population would not be able to read this article in 1925. 

Although that time frame is referred to as the end of the Gilded Age, the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the migration of rural to urban life, standard of living rising for a lot of people as they saw their incomes reach roughly 5000 dollars a year or about 90,000 in today’s dollars, prosperity was on the march, the stock market was trending up, it was the Jazz Age, a new prosperous middle class was being birthed, the country was emerging from the daze of WWI, the pictures we see today of that time are mostly tunneled through an ocular device that gives us a pointed picture of a specific segment of society that does not represent the overall US population.   

Undoubtably, there were a lot of positive points to point to.  The United States was experiencing a boom in economic terms, women got the right to vote finally, although the 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited alcohol sales and production, many Americans disregarded this and ironically out of this era came the many fruit drinks and various cocktails that we enjoy today because the booze people produced was just so awful that it had to be made palatable.  Radio was bringing entertainment to millions of households, the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing, people were able to purchase things such as refrigerators which allowed for them to store food for longer periods of time, cars were becoming more mainstream, a general level of easiness was creeping into the minds of a lot of people who were seeing a prosperous future for their families. 

But not all was well on the Western Hemisphere – at least not by today’s standards. 

Even though the first quarter of the 20th century is considered part of the Progressive Era, most of the working class didn’t experience the benefits of urban life. Many struggled to survive. One in three people living in the cities was close to starvation. Poor urban workers experienced overcrowded living conditions, dirty and poorly lit working conditions, insufficient clean water supplies, poor sewage methods and disease. The poor working class resided in slums and relied on low wages for basic survival. Many had a better standard of living as rural farmers in America or in their native homelands than in industrialized American cities.  (Working Conditions 1870 to 1940 | Vanished)

In 1925 it took an average of 4 days to go from New York to San Francisco.  In 1925 the child mortality rate was 462.9 deaths per thousand births for children under the age of 5.  There was rampant organized crime resulting of Prohibition, lawlessness, nativism, huge divisions between people, massive inequalities, anarchism, the inevitable crash of the market a mere 4 years later, unemployment, lack of dependable medical care for diseases to the point of almost certain death from diseases we can readily treat today with modern medicine.  Life expectancy in 1925: 58.6 years.

Today, despite the many problems we are facing, and we are facing some serious issues in our country today, mostly self-inflicted, there is cause for optimism.  There is cause for optimism because our history is rife with instances where the country gets on a path of progress for a long time, only to be yanked back into darkness for brief periods by groups of people who don’t seem to like the way things are progressing.  But progress cannot be stopped and despite our stubbornness to deny reality sometimes, we do tend to learn from mistakes we make if only grudgingly.  Not many countries or groups stick around unless they are willing to adapt to the future.  This is not about a political viewpoint – this is reality.

As long as the Roman Empire was willing to adapt and expand, however they expanded right or wrong, they were growing.  They were learning.  They were flourishing.  It wasn’t until they became sluggish, complacent, backwards looking, clinging to an unrealistic and vastly inaccurate nostalgic pretense for a past that they began to die.  The Empire fell apart because it became the problem.  It wasn’t agile anymore; it wasn’t the place to be.  There were better ideas out there, there were better places to be and people just got tired of being cast aside as if they were just cattle, there for the entertainment of the power elites. 

The United States of today has a lot of opportunities to be optimistic.  We have the ability to innovate and to overcome problems even if we are dragged along kicking and screaming, clinging to a wildly inaccurate nostalgic notion of a past that not only is gone by the waste side, but it also never existed in the first place. 

The 1925 America that we refer to as the Jazz Age cannot hold a candle to today’s modern conveniences and the vastly improved standards of living we enjoy compared to that time frame.  Someday, in the distant future, we may go the way of the Roman Empire and shrink into a new Italy.  But right now we are just going through another temper tantrum that we will need to survive so that we can get back on the path of progress and innovation. 

In the future, there will be machinery and robotics and progress, the likes of which we can’t even fathom.  There will be a standard of living for everyone that will dwarf those enjoyed by billionaires today.  There will be prosperity that will put the Gilded Age to shame.  We are not going to get there by regressing, like we are doing today, but we will get there once the Baby Boomers, and my generation gives way to the future and allows our children and grandchildren to continue on a path of prosperity instead of destruction. 

As Steve Jobs so eloquently put it, “death is the single best innovation of life”.  It will take the dying of old and outdated ideas to really focus the next generations to come to understand what America really means, and it won’t be about looking back to a past that never was.  It will be about looking forward to a future that they will build. 

And THAT is the reason we can be wildly optimist about the future.