Quote Originally Posted by RockyR View Post
Shoeless working class. Dirty masses. 1 or MAYBE 2 shirts and pairs of pants (or kilts) for each person. Working in the facroty 10 - 12 hours a day with no windows and no fire escapes. Paid in company script to buy things at the company store.
No, the alternatives are what we see the beginnings of right now....and no one here in this discussion seems to be willing to address or confront--the alternatives are global warming. And great huge floating rafts, bigger than some states, in the Pacific ocean comprised of plastic bags, discarded clothing, shoes, syringes, beer can rings--all the detritus of a throw-away, consumer culture. The real alternatives are loss of habitat and biomes.

Of being alone in a world we have sterilized in pursuit of "efficiency" and comfort.

Extrapolate into the future ten years, twenty...none of us are responsible because we are just making semi-quality, graded-quality widgets 8 hours a day in a job we hate.

And it is those people right there who are the faceless masses that you talk about--they live in urban squalor and always will. In quiet desperation because nothing they encounter in their work days, in their leisure time has any real meaning for them. They can't afford the luxury of a Rocky Mountain getaway or a Caribbean summer home.

And as each passing fad comes and goes...kilts too, perhaps?...they move onto the next looking for who knows what and never look back. There are no "good old days" for this and the next and the next generation. Not even in their proximate memories.The problem is there are no good new days ether.

It also might be pointed out that having plastic shoes is not significantly different from having currans strapped to your feet. Neither are the best option. But of course your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren won't have to pay for the currans.

I am not looking to take us back to 1880. Read that statement again...I am not wanting to go back. But there were a lot of good things in the way people approached life and work. And a lot of lessons to be learned.

If progress has given us anything of value....it has given us the luxury, if we will but reach out and take it, to re-evaluate the present and shape the future so that it is not just an extrapolation of the current dismal state of affairs that is so horrible no one (here) wants to deal with it.

There 's a lot of the 19th century, and even the 18th century, that could be embraced in the 21st century and it would be a good thing--a revitalizing thing.