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Author Topic: Food for thought about current times  (Read 1074 times)

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VaEagle

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Food for thought about current times
« on: May 08, 2020, 03:46:06 PM »

I got this as an email today and thought it gave a different perspective on life:



Food for thought!!!!


This is why we love and respect the elderly in society.


Think of this -


Maybe we don't have it that bad?


So many of us are stressed with the current situation. For a small amount of perspective at this moment, imagine YOU were born in 1900.


On your 14th birthday, World War I starts, and ends on your 18th birthday. 22 million people perish in that war. Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until your 20th birthday. 50 million people die from it in those two years. Yes, 50 million.


On your 29th birthday, the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, the World GDP drops 27%. That runs until you are 33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy.


When you turn 39, World War II starts.(Some of us were born, then.) You aren’t even over the hill yet. And don’t try to catch your breath. On your 41st birthday, the United States is fully pulled into WWII. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perish in the war.


Smallpox was epidemic until you were in your 40’s, as it killed 300 million people during your lifetime.


At 50, the Korean War starts. 5 million perish. From your birth, until you are 55 you dealt with the fear of Polio epidemics each summer. You experience friends and family contracting polio and being paralyzed and/or die.


At 55 the Vietnam War begins and doesn’t end for 20 years. 4 million people perish in that conflict. During the Cold War, you lived each day with the fear of nuclear annihilation. On your 62nd birthday you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War. Life on our planet, as we know it, almost ended. When you turn 75, the Vietnam War finally ends.


Think of everyone on the planet born in 1900. How did they endure all of that? When you were a kid in 1985 and didn’t think your 85 year old grandparent understood how hard school was.  They survived through everything listed above.


Perspective is an amazing art!. Refined and enlightening as time goes on. Let’s try and keep things in perspective.


Your parents and/or grandparents were called to endure all of the above – you are called to stay home, "Spring Clean", discover all "lost" items,  sit on your  couch and watch TV?.


Stay well!



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GregKhougaz

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Re: Food for thought about current times
« Reply #1 on: May 08, 2020, 04:37:42 PM »

 :2vrolijk_21:   :2vrolijk_21:   :2vrolijk_21:   :2vrolijk_21:
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r0de_runr

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Re: Food for thought about current times
« Reply #2 on: May 09, 2020, 04:50:51 AM »

My Dad was born in 1905 and mom in 1912. Dad died in 1996 and mom in 2004.

I have often mused about the things he saw:

Invention of the Airplane.
The whole automobile thing - he loved his cars, we still have his 1955 Packard.
Motorcycles.
Radio, Television, cable TV.
Colt Marksman Target Model.
Belgian Browning Light Twelve.
Air Conditioning.
The Zebco 33.  I have all my dads old fishing gear including a stainless steel fishing pole.
8mm Movie Camera.
CokaCola - Dad drove a Coke truck during the depression.
6 children, none of whom ever got arrested (not yet anyway).
Space Flight - Moon Landing.
Personal Computers, though he never had one.
CB Radios - he was "Boothill Bill".
Electric Range (cooktop).
Natural Gas heat, central furnace.
Gasoline Lawnmower - but he still pushed it.

He loved going to motorcycle races and we had lots of them in Dodge City, but he never rode a motorcycle that I knew of.

Dad worked in a butcher shop in Ness City KS when he met my mom, then later owned his own grocery store in Dodge City KS.  He wore a white shirt and tie to work every day, opened at 8am, didn't get home till 7pm most days, 6 days a week, till he hit 65 and Urban Renewal shut him down.

We can look at the bad, or the good. He was a good man. The finest thing I can hear from anyone is "you're just like your dad..."

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Greg
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Re: Food for thought about current times
« Reply #3 on: May 09, 2020, 08:07:10 AM »

My grandparents were all born in the 1880s, late 1800s.  My grandad (Dad's Dad) would tell the story of how they went to the "Big City" - Ft. Worth - once a month or less for supplies by a mule drawn wagon. Trip took 2-3 days. He plowed with mules, had the reign marks on his hands his whole life. He was struck by lightning & lived to tell about it.  Both sets of grandparents were farmers. He died in 1971 but lived long enough to see us land on the moon.  What an amazing time to be alive.  I was born in the 1950s & have seen a lot of changes, but nothing as dramatic as that - travel by horse & train to cars, planes, and rockets by the 1960s.

My other grandfather - Mom's Dad - served in WWI.  He was in Europe when he caught the Spanish flu.  He was sent home & spent 6 months in an Army hospital in San Antonio.  He almost died.  After he was well enough they Army discharged him & he returned home to farm until he retired in the early 1970s. 

One of my grandmothers carried a handgun in her apron when she was a young woman.  It was protection from Indians & to make sure the bums & drifters that stopped by for food knew to stay back away from the porch.  She always fed them but would not allow them to be that close to the house.  A different world.  One of my regrets is I didn't talk to them more about the times they grew up in.  I know a lot of the stories - one grandfather "rescued" my grandmother from an orphanage & took her home to marry her when she was 15.  They came from families with a dozen kids apiece, when her parents died when she was 5 she was youngest & was sent to the orphanage because none of the family had room for her. 

The times they are always a-changing.  I have grandkids now & figure by the time they are grandparents the world will be so different I would not recognize, but I won't be around to see it.
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chaos901

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Re: Food for thought about current times
« Reply #4 on: May 11, 2020, 04:52:08 PM »

I remember when my Grandfather was dying in the mid-70's (I was named for him).  Anyway, he was telling my father (a WW2 vet himself) about all the great things he had seen in his lifetime.  He was a Captain in Pershing's Army in WW1, saw the first airplanes, then all of the following advancements up to landing on the moon. 
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