I have begun scanning my father’s color slides so that they will be preserved in a digital format. Mom sent me the first of 35 boxes of slides. There were 134 slides in the projector carousel. Looking at these old pictures of interiors of our houses in Rantoul, IL or Fargo, ND, and our cars, and our shoes, and TV sets, I am struck by the fact that we, the middle class of the 1950’s lived like the poor of 21st century America live now, as far as the material world goes. Of course, being in the military, we had health insurance, but that was somewhat unusual. Insurance or not, we were vulnerable to polio and scarlet fever and other such since-conquered afflictions.
Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1830 (via David Frum):“If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty millions, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now are, that cultivation, rich as that of a flower-garden, will be carried up to the very tops of Ben Nevis and Helvellyn, that machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house, that there will be no highways but railroads, no travelling but by steam, that our debt, vast as it seems to us, will appear to our great-grandchildren a trifling encumbrance, which might easily be paid off in a year or two, many people would think us insane. … We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason. … On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us? “