Times change don’t they?... and I suppose most people think and hope that those changes will be for the better. And to a large extent that is exactly what does happen.
Just look at the cars of today, compared with those of fifty or more years ago, the Morris Minor and the Mini bear little relationship to the Golf and almost all of the Japanese cars, so popular today.
Then, you had manual gear changing, now it’s all automatic; then, you required a Melway or other form of street guide, today most cars can tell you exactly where you’re going and how long it’s going to take you to get there. Marvelous!
One could go on for ever, pointing out the various wonderful things we enjoy now, compared to the ten or so years just after the last war, but in fact, is everything better than then?
I recall a time when we could all go out and play in the street, without fear of fast-moving traffic or perverts to spoil our pleasure, or the way you could go away for two weeks holiday without locking up your house, and be pretty certain everything will still be there when you got back! Try that today!
Then there’s fashion, not just in clothing but in general appearance, attitude and a natural ability to look good, always.
For thousands of years girls have been feminine and beautiful, while boys have been brave and boisterous, a perfectly natural order, (which some would say represents the way God made us and intended us to be), and it is a system that has worked well for such a long period of time.
Look at photographs from around that period and you see beautiful young girls, smartly though casually dressed with attractive hair styles, good figures and smiling faces.
Now, it can be hard to tell who or what many of them are, with their badly designed clothes, trousers containing more holes than actual material and everything in various shades of mud colour. And their faces - well, what can one say.
These particular females have makeup on, (sometimes), but it seems to be makeup designed to make the poor girls look ugly, even the ones who you can see, are actually quite beautiful underneath.
And the boys aren’t much better either, with their weirdly shaven heads, black or grey “hoodies” - the universal colour scheme, and trousers with the crutch placed just above the knees, (how are they supposed to run away from the cops with trousers like that?).
It never ceases to amaze me, the amount of change that can take place in such a comparatively short space of time; from loving themselves, each other, and life itself, to young people who seem to hate everything and even to be proud of the fact.
These modern kids seem to have no idea of the great world, full of adventure and excitement, waiting for them out there, to wake up and join in the fun.
I’m an old codger of 89 years with a lovely wife of 84, and I seriously believe we get more fun and joy out of life now, than many of today’s kids ever do, mainly perhaps because during the war we had to make our own entertainment, and with fathers away fighting and mothers trying to keep things going on their own, we became self-reliant, and respectful of those who had given us life in the first place.
Thank goodness the young people I refer to above represent a fairly small percentage of the youth of today, they’re not ALL ‘drop-outs’ who are unable to see any future either for themselves or anyone else - it must be a very unhappy life for them, to feel like that.
As I said in the beginning of this blog, “times change don’t they” and I can only hope this continues to happen, and we grow back into a better, more sensible world as time goes by!
© 2023 Brian Lee
