Comparing 2018 and 1918...Are we happier?

  • Thread starter Thread starter JamalChristophr
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I wasn’t alive in 1918, so I can’t compare happiness levels.

But if I’d given birth to my son in 1918, he would have been a stillborn, or died within hours of his birth.

Thanks God we are alive when we are!

This is The Only Time We Have. Let’s get to work!
 
Is it true that working just eight hours a day was a rare thing back in 1918?
Oh, and a side comment…

Solanus Casey, Father, that is, was 48 years old at the time. I would have liked to have known him.

The time is always ripe for being a Saint, it seems.
 
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Zero hour and the clock is standing still
Time has finally come
Time has finally come
The hour is finished
Light has shown its last
Everything is done
Everything is done
And the World is standing still
Do you remember how we used to sing
Songs of yesterday?
On Luftwaffe wings?
Lifting high a glass to Green the Hour?
Do you recall the fun we had
In uniform with flags?
How we’d lay down in the fields?
Sure we were immortal?
But time has finally come
Now that everything is done
So we go
So we go
Down like the Summer
Down like the Autumn
Like frost falling fast
With it’s killing power
Falling fast
Falling fast
Do you remember how the clouds used to linger
Like the sun would never shine again?
Why couldn’t we see they were drifting away?
Do you remember how the sun used to shine
Like we were standing in forever?
Why couldn’t we see it was going down?
Like us
Like us
Down like the Summer
Down like the Autumn
Like frost falling fast
With it’s killing power
Falling fast
Falling fast
At Zero hour
Where we’re in the dark
Standing still
Standing still
Just feel the ice
On your window sill
At Zero hour
Where our dreams fall apart
Where we master the art of going down
There we go
There we go
Down like the Summer
Down like the Autumn
Like frost falling fast
With it’s killing power
Falling fast
Falling fast
To Zero hour
 
I’m sure if I’d been alive in 1918 I would have had a short,simple but difficult life with a very different set of problems .I would have had simple devotions with so much less to distract me and the path to heaven would have been more clear and come about sooner.
 
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How 'bout the END OF THE WORLD predictions, one
was for 1918!!

1918
International Bible Students Association
“Christendom shall be cut off and glorification of the Little Flock (The Church) in the Spring of 1918 A. D.”

Funny to hear that TODAY, 100 yrs later!!
 
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Supposedly three percent of the world’s population died in the flu pandemic in 1918

I’m not a student of history, so this figure is rather astounding to me. I didn’t realize a flu virus could be so virulent.

I think in a worldly way we are much happier now, but on a spiritual plane, I think it’s quite possible we have descended since then. Even scripture talks about evil and loss of Faith growing in the world. I don’t mean to say that evil grows from century to century but there is an ebb and flow to it. When Israel was doing really well in a worldly way, they also tended to abandon God to some degree as a whole.
 
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DarkLight said:
Yup - I know full well kids like me didn’t survive in 1918. I battled antibiotic resistance for years. Kid like me in 1918 was sickly and finally died in pain after a few years.
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You know how in old books there are a lot of mysteriously sickly kids and adults?

Now we know what that stuff was.
 
JamalChristophr said:
Supposedly three percent of the world’s population died in the flu pandemic in 1918

I’m not a student of history, so this figure is rather astounding to me. I didn’t realize a flu virus could be so virulent.
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It is my understanding that the world travels that accompanied WWI spread this flu in a way that was unprecedented. Soldiers came from all over the world, caught the virus and took it home with them.

My grandmother lost her fiance to the flu of 1918. My grandfather came by the house to offer his condolences. The rest is history.
 
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Maximilian75 said:
I meant that, since SWM have had no major changes in their quality of life in the last 100 years, they’re an easy group to look at in this context. They’re an easy control group.
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Straight white men live a lot longer than they used to.

Also, we don’t have a draft anymore, and we haven’t had a war with mass conscription in over 40 years.
 
Yes, that’s about right, 3-5%, that’s 50 to 100 million people who died from influenza or complications there of.
 
I wonder if such a think were remotely possible today? I don’t know that much about epidemiology and viruses, etc.
 
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JamalChristophr said:
I’m not a student of history, so this figure is rather astounding to me. I didn’t realize a flu virus could be so virulent.
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It was a particularly bad flu in that it did not kill off just the normal people who die of flu, as in the elderly and the people who are already having health problems from something else when the flu hits them, but instead it killed a lot of people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Since the flu virus mutates, we could conceivably have such a pandemic again sometime.

There have also been significant flu pandemics in 1957 (when my mother caught it and was very sick and had to be taken care of by her landlady), 1968 (when I was a very little girl and remember that I and both of my parents all came down with it) and 2009 (when I went to an open air music festival that drew an international crowd and a lot of the people attending were in facemasks because of the flu concern).

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/basics/past-pandemics.html
 
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DarkLight said:
That was right after Birth of a Nation was released. I’ve been meaning to watch that - we always talked about that film in aesthetics class. It made for a good discussion on whether artistic merits can be separated from moral aspects of the work.
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I’ve seen it.

It has a thrilling scene with the Klansmen riding heroically to the rescue.
 
So Birth of a Nation is a film that is well worth watching then? Maybe I better check it out.
 
Theban said:
With that said, however, I would like to add that wishing back to a former time is absurd, seeing as how, when God made us, he did not have a pre-made timeline to simply place us along in different eras. The time we live in is an intrinsic part of who we are, and changing it would be like changing our DNA, we would cease to be ourselves and could not exist as God intended.
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One of my kids was having a hard time dealing with the Holocaust Memoir (Wiesel’s Night) that they’re reading at school.

This is not a complete fix, but I did point out to kid that were it not for WWII, probably none of us in our family would exist–where our ancestors were and who they met and married was largely driven by the war.
 
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