ecl@mtgzz.UUCP (e.c.leeper) (10/08/85)
> Until you can show me undenialble proof that you and all of us know where we > are going, I will choose to remain in the past, after all, the past worked > and has spoken for itself (there wasn't a 50% divorce rate) the present > doesn't look too healthy, and the future is cloaked in the vagueness of > experimentation. I must answer this one. How far in the past do you want live? 50 years? A hundred years? 500 years? How about 700 years ago? Seven hundred years ago, there wasn't a 50% divorce rate, BUT life expectancy was about 35 (if that), not 70 if you lived in Europe--a relatively "modern" place--your chances of dying of the Plague were about one in three if you were Jewish, or atheist, or anything else except Catholic, you had a good chance of being burning at the stake or worse you probably couldn't read, couldn't write, couldn't change jobs you could find yourself sold in slavery to pay your debts, assuming that your serfdom wasn't already slavery, which it was if you were a woman, your life consisted of bearing child after child, with no way of limiting your family size, and then watching them starve because you couldn't feed them if you were a man, your life consisted of back-breaking labor, with all the best that your produced going to the King or the Duke or the Church and the dregs going to you and your family--unless you were conscripted into an army for a Crusade or a war, in which case you got to die a painful battlefield death with no medical assistance other than *perhaps* a priest to give you the last rites you had no rights, no redress under law against the noble or stole you property, raped your daughter, killed your one cow, or burned your fields, no hope of a better future for you or your children, no rest, and an early grave Oh, you thought you'd get to be a noble or a scholar in the past? The percentage of those was *considerably* less than 50% and, frankly, you're better off risking the divorce. (P.S. They died of the Plague too.) As for > Until you can show me undenialble proof that you and all of us know where we > are going, I will choose to remain in the past, after all, the past worked consider the influx of Russian Jews at the turn of the century. The past (Russia) sure as hell didn't work for them, and they may not have known what they would find in America, but leaving Russia and cretain death at the hands of Cossacks in a pogrom seemed like one hell of a good idea to them. On the other hand, the German Jews of the Thirties who chose to stay in the Germany that they knew rather than risk the unknown undoubtedly came to wish--too late, unfortunately--that they had moved on. A science fiction author once said of progress: "It's the aerodynamics of a bird in flight. It presents more of a target with its wings outspread, but that's the only way it can move forward." And as Woody Allen pointed out in ANNIE HALL, a shark has to keep moving forward to eat or it will die. We--the human race--keep moving forward, or we will die. Not moving forward blindly, of course, but not wishing, just as blindly, for the good old days "when men were men, women were women, Blacks were lynched, and Jews were gassed." "Those who dream wistfully of the past should be condemned to live there." Evelyn C. Leeper ...ihnp4!mtgzz!ecl