January 19, 2016
I wrote this a few days ago. I didn't read anything before I wrote it, or try to get documentation for the timeline of it. I don't think it's ever a bad century to promote helping people.
Romantic couples who aren't able to be with each other because of obstacles is getting to be a last-century theme for white, heterosexual couples in 1st world countries. It was a main theme for centuries, and it's not like that nearly as much as it used to be. If you were upper-class, you used to have to be married off to people according to money and caste and what your parents wanted. If you were poor, even though many of the restrictions of upper-class social machinations weren't there, the restrictions of race and religion were. Also, probably women who have money were always able to limit the number of children that they had in ways that women without money couldn't; many of them probably chose not to, but I'm sure that whatever options for birth control there ever were for centuries, women who had money had more access to them than women without money, even if that were just the ability of a wife to say to her husband, as the daughter of a respected family "I don't want to be pregnant again." For couples who didn't love each other or who weren't attracted to each other, that would be the end of their sexual relationship, and the man would have mistresses, visit prostitutes, and/or rape the servants, and probably not as infrequently as people know of, their own sons and daughters and other young relatives or dependents. A woman in a higher social situation whose husband would not stop demanding sex of her would not get support from her parents or other people from her family if they weren't supportive of her generally, but a woman who had a family that loved her might have been able to have a discreet conversation with a mother or sister, whose husband or son or brother might then have approached the woman's husband to discreetly tell him to stop.
The 30s were the Depression.
The 40s were the war.
The 50s had a rigid social and business structure, and expectations of a family of a certain size. A couple could spend a lifetime trying to meet all of the requirements for life in a neighborhood and at the man's place of work.
The 60s had a cultural revolution.
The 70s; I'm not sure. That's when I was born, so I don't have as much distance from it. My parents weren't really hippies, and we were in rural Vermont. It could be that, for the white people who were teenagers and in their 20s in the 60s, the 70s were about either having to settle down in some way and taking stock of their situations, or trying to reconcile an uninhibited lifestyle with the need to have a roof and food every day, or trying to find a way to pay for their drug habits.
The 80s were rehab and trying to make money, weren't they? Baby Boomers in their 40s, realizing that everybody gets old, trying to make the aging process as painless as possible. Also, you don't get "free love" when you're a poor 40-year-old man the way that you do when you're a poor 20-year-old man. Is this cynical? I think it has to be true to a certain extent; it's not as if women had full equality in the workplace or the home by the 1980s, so what drove that feverish, supposedly generational but probably mostly male, lust for money if it wasn't the midlife crisis of the male Baby Boomers?
By the 90s, the children of the Boomers were losing it a little, so the Boomers had to spend another 10 years that they didn't think they'd have to, caring for the adult children whose childhoods were damaged by the lack of primary caregivers and tension between couples who didn't want the restrictions of the 50s but who didn't know what to do without them.
Then, the pharmaceutical industry stepped into all of that confusion and got everybody diagnosed with lifelong illnesses, and by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, that was what everyone was doing; being ill or believing that he or she had to be a caregiver as a full-time job.
A lot of the world has so many problems surviving every day that all of the above doesn't apply as much. However, it seems to me that a theme of service to the greater good would be a good unifier for everyone in 1st World countries. The Internet and all of the technology like it have made it almost impossible for people only to be aware of the world in their own homes and neighborhoods; we are going to be a global society.
Since that's how the world is progressing, shouldn't being part of the world in a positive way be promoted through the entertainment industry and every other available method? The world has no end of problems. People who aren't in 1st world countries are not able to do anything else with their lives except to try to survive those problems; people in 1st world countries would be happier and more productive if it were an assumption that everybody has contributing to society as a major part of his or her life. People who have similar interests in terms of what that contribution is would meet and get married or at least be couples; there would also be people who have dissimilar, specific interests whose value systems would nonetheless bring them to each other and support them being married or couples.
People need something around which to build their lives. The healthier the things are around which they do that, the healthier those people and their children and their relationships to people outside their families will be.
I don't think that many people would accuse me of having a dull life. There's nothing like being morally impelled to defy the powers that be; literally every second of my life is a drama for somebody. I would not choose to have it be like this, but, since I can't not choose to be morally impelled, this is what my life is like. I don't think it's that unusual for someone who is so impelled to then be mercilessly persecuted by those who are being defied.
It would be nice if the powers that be didn't do that.
Copyright L. Kochman, June 19, 2016 @ 1:23 p.m.