|
|
||
Kate Dolan's op-ed on the troubled times in which we live--we don't know what trouble is Date published: 2/14/2010
BALTIMORE --"These are troubled times," my pastor lamented not long ago. Most of the heads in the congregation nodded in agreement.Can they be serious? A look at the past tells us that by comparison, we live in the best of times. But that doesn't stop us from complaining. It grates on my nerves to hear people (sometimes even myself) complain about how tough we have it now. A local radio DJ went on at length about our modern woes: home foreclosures, joblessness, high gas prices. Yes, these are problems. But his closing remark was nothing short of insane: "Man, I sure picked a bad time to be born." A bad time to be born? Really? Even in the midst of a severe recession, we have it better than most any people at any time in human existence. Today, Americans of modest means can expect to live in a house with running water, heat in winter, and nutritious food all year long. They take holidays, and can visit friends and family hundreds of miles away either by driving their own car or actually flying through the air. And if that weren't enough, they don't have to worry about their kids succumbing to diseases like smallpox, malaria, or the bubonic plague. Would that DJ prefer to live in the opulent court of King Louis IV? Even the nobility had to contend with a 50 percent child mortality rate, rampant disease, and travel limited to bumpy, unheated carriages or ships that sailed with the vagaries of the wind. Don't even think about on-time percentages here. Travel time was measured in weeks, not minutes. And then there's the basic measure of prosperity. The Bible describes the good life as living to harvest the fruits of your own vineyard. Today, we take the ability to own property, to enjoy the fruits of our own labor, as a given. It's not. Tribes of humans have been pushing each other off their land on a regular basis for thousands of years. That has been standard operating procedure in every corner of the globe for all of recorded history. It's still happening in parts of the world today. But in the United States, we haven't had to worry much about invading armies taking livestock and burning our crops and houses since the Civil War.
|
|
||||||||||||
