I completed two score years and ten this past weekend.
Coincidentally, last month, on one of my visits while my dad was ill, I walked past the very room where I entered life at the Kingsbury way back in 1958.
Back then we had electricity. Of course, we didn’t have much equipment that needed it, so there was never too much of a supply problem. And that was before the days when we feared being drowned in warm soup as the polar regions melted, so dirty coal was the only fuel source, and grateful we were for it too.
No TV, not even black and white. No computers. Old bakelite phones that weighed as much as a modern US teenager – and which we could only get from Telkom, which worked, even though they never answered their phones. No mobile phones, although CB radio was a moerse craze when I passed Matric. No electronic games. No calculators. No digital watches. No brand name clothing. No iPods, although cassette players were pretty big when I was 10.
No internet, which meant no Skype, which meant long chats to a girlfriend were always followed by parental recrimination. Movies were once a week at the single bioscope nearby, or the Drive In. Sundays were the longest day of the year and we rushed to church in droves simply to relieve the tedium. No fast food, other than a few Drive In takeaways. Very little obesity: You were either very rich or challenged glandularly.
And my point? Back when I matriculated in 1975, 95% of of us couldn’t get jobs although most of us seem to have made it this far. And the future was just as bleak as it seems now. But we’re mostly still here. And back then it seemed like everything worth doing had already been done. It hadn’t, because most of us now do work that we would not have conceived of even if we’d been able to get some of that crazy shyte everyone seemed to be smoking in the USA. And back then the USA was in a war they couldn’t win, this time in the Far East.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the immortal words of Alfred E. Neumann: “What me worry.”