Tuesday 3 November 2009

The bad in everything?

Despite most posts pointing to the contrary, I don’t see horrible vileness around every corner or in every situation that flashes before my senses, there’s lots to be happy about, to smile at, to enjoy — despite the newly perched mongers: doom and gloom, even when i’m frothingly aiming at feralality & feralism, because we haven’t emerged (all of a sudden) out of misty depths, from a time that embodied everything that was wonderful and fantastic, a procession highlighted by aimless walks amongst avenues filled with soft-petaled roses, with nothing greater to tax than mind than whether to press — or not — on a grape; but, as any cursory glance through our history readily reveals, there has never been a period when utter peace and limpid harmony reigned over the globe, ever.

What was a cut-purse?  Nothing but a pickpocket with knife, whom we now label muggers that are now, sadly, just as happy confronting you whether you’re paying attention or not, in a general air of merry-making bloody-mindedness, ensuring you know that you’ve been done

A highwayman?  A man or men on horses who would hold up your carriage, shot your driver, rob your jewels, your mistress, and if your loot was heftier than a silver purse (or was that a sow) would use your carriage as the getaway vehicle and all with the use of pistols.  Today, we call them car-jackers, who’ll not only rob you of your car, but your shopping and if your unlucky enough to have baby onboard, then poor baby too.

You were also more likely to have your money fleeced in a local protection racket, a business deal, gambling, investing in tulips with scant recourse for any return except revenge on a field of valour in a duel that had already been tampered with, whilst sexual mores had the tendency of landing you with either a child or a pox.  People were likely to die if wounds became infected, of a childhood illness, women in childbirth, of a fever...

The explosion in population’s due, in no mean part, to the explosion of ‘biotics, better and varied foods, cleaner water all increasing the survival rates in many parts of the world of not only the young and the old but of everyone.

Don't forget it wasn't exactly hundreds of years ago that children were sent into mines or mills to work from the age of six.  The elderly would be shuffled off somewhere to die of malaria and those in-between caught in some continent waging war or off conquering lands by evicting the former tenants.  So despite things not been as "perfect" as we'd like, there’s only ever been a few, who have ever had life that easy, I suppose they would (by todays standards) be the multi-billionaires.  The multi-millionaires would be the scrooges and his peers, and those non-million anything would be the tiny tims, olivers, cooks and chimney sweeps coughing up their last bit of ragged bloodied sputum, before been slowly broiled after getting wedged and left forgotten, in some two-up during mid-swing.

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