Ffffffreeezing . . . and a rant

In the 20s. The best thing about it is I am not at work. Ice is a small price to pay for that!

And now for a rant. God knows I'm due one.

Before I hit my 30s and my biological clock started ticking, I maintained that I did not want any children because I wouldn't know how to prepare them for life--the world as I knew it would essentially disappear within 50 years, and I didn't know how to raise them to deal with life in that world. Sure, I could give them a love of Shakespeare and drag them through museums and read Goodnight Moon, but even I, who's sort of a Trekkie, could not have imagined dealing with this strange culture.

I'm going to sound impossibly old and curmudgeonly, but here it is: I wish my girls would have grown up in my time. Here's a laundry list, for posterity, of the world I know:

1. There was value in a liberal arts education.
2. The church was still the church, not an entertainment venue that was only one Sunday morning choice.
3. Senseless murders were such a rarity that Truman Capote could get rich off writing a book about one incident.
4. One could actually understand the people who worked at any store in the city--and they could understand you when you spoke English. And, I might add, they didn't sneer at you for asking a question.
5. People wrote letters to one another. On paper. With a pen. In cursive.
6. Wars were fought to win. (Okay, Vietnam was my era, so this one's not absolutely accurate.)
7. Small business were the norm rather than the exception. Chain stores were, for the most part, a novelty.
8. There were no such things as privacy fences. One knew one's neighbors. 
9. Tattoos were only for sailors--the male variety.
10. One's level of health care was determined by one's illness, not one's insurance company.
11. Girl Scouts sold cookies door to door. 
12. Before nationalization, trains took one where one wanted to go, efficiently and for a reasonable price.
13. Not everyone owned a car, and if one did own a car, one had a driver's license and actually knew how to drive.
14. Immigrants were legal, or they were deported. Period.

In honor of my rant, a photo of me in the British Museum

There could be more ranting, but this representative sample is enough. For now. Of course the downside of my world was that women were treated even worse than they are now. So were people of color. No one cared about trash on the sides of the roads, air pollution, or strip mining. Vietnam veterans were pariahs. American corporations became greedy enough to send factories and jobs overseas. Another representative sample.

Can we change? Is our culture redeemable? Perhaps--one person at a time.