average life

There’s a strange segment of the population so disaffected with their lives and the state of the world that they imagine themselves fitting in better at another point in history.  They seem to forget that the world for much of human history has pretty much sucked.

“I should have been born during the middle ages.”

Really?  Are you sure about that?  You’re probably imagining yourself riding around on a horse as a knight, living in a palace, and being all chivalrous, but the Middle Ages weren’t all that great.  In fact, the middle ages weren’t even halfway decent.  The life that we imagine everyone leading in the middle ages existed for such a small segment of the population, that it would be like looking at Los Angeles and imagine everyone living like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, which anyone driving through Compton will attest, is not the case.

Who you imagine that you would be.

Who you would actually be.

The majority of people that lived in Europe during the middle ages were serfs to a lord.  Feudalism basically meant that your dream of that 3/2 ranch house doesn’t exist in this time.  Most serfs were essentially slaves who were tied to the land and were bought and sold with it.  Don’t like the view?  Unless your lord gives you permission (and he won’t), you’re stuck with it.  The best you could hope for was to attain “freeman” status which meant that you didn’t have to drop everything when your lord needed his wheat harvested, but you still rented your land from him…for your entire life.

But it doesn’t matter, because you’re not going to live that long anyway.  Life was so awful for the peasants that the average life expectancy was just 30.  Thirty.  Years.  Old.  The average life expectancy of someone living in the Stone Age was 33, which means that you had a slightly better chance of living longer trying to kill mammoths as thick-browed half-ape on the tundra than you did farming for your feudal lord.

“I Belong In A Jane Austen Novel”

Sure, it’d be fun to be a character in a Jane Austen novel unless, of course, your character is a woman.  Austen, herself, inserted into her novels heavy themes of the dependency of women on men, especially when it came to financial matters.  Being unable to work, own property, vote (in countries where they even did that sort of thing), or be considered a citizen meant that any influence that women had at all over their own lives had to be exerted through the men in their life.  Even to publish Sense and Sensibility, Austen had to send her brother, Henry, to the publisher on her behalf.  This meant that marriage was often a business arrangement in which women competed in marriage markets in order  to snag a man that would be able to provide for her completely – since she had no way of doing it herself.

Marriage: You're doing it wrong.

“I Wish I Lived In Mayberry”

In an age of a 50% divorce rate, kids glued to their Wiis, and boys marrying boys, some find themselves longing for a simpler time – a time of family values, apple pie, and Aunt Bee.  That’s right, the 50’s.  The fifties were a great time, if you weren’t worried about being annihilated in a nuclear blast detonated at any given moment by the Russians.  Which everyone was.

Looks like we ain't going to Mt. Pilot anymore.

Fear of nuclear war was so prevalent that President Kennedy advised the use of fallout shelters.  Nelson Rockafeller (and other rich-guy types) drew up plans for a network of fallout shelters across the country and the government got into the mix, installing shelters in publicly-funded buildings like hospitals and, you know, schools.  In the event of a nuclear attack, people were told to “duck and cover” (since, you know, the radiation couldn’t get you if you couldn’t see it coming) and there were civil defense drills where alarms went off all over the country to help prepare people for the day when they might end up vaporized in a millisecond.  The Bomb was such a integral part of popular culture that when a new type of swimsuit was invented, it was named after a place where the atomic bombs were tested, the Bikini Atoll.

Today, while we may be concerned with climate change, it’s nothing compared to the thought that any minute the world is going to go all Dr. Strangelove on you.

If the threat of nuclear war wasn’t enough to make you love the fifties, how about polio?  Thanks to vaccines, polio is pretty much a non issue these days, but it was a huge deal back in the 1950’s where in 1952 alone there were 52,000 new cases of polio reported.  The fifties saw the larges outbreak ever and by the seventies, over of a quarter of a million people had been paralyzed by the disease.  It affected so many people that many of our laws and policies regarding people with disabilities came about because of people paralyzed by polio.

Or how about measles?  There was no vaccine in the 1950s for the disease which is estimated to have killed over 200 million people over the course of human history and at one point, wiped out a third of the population of Fiji.

I guess Jenny is more of a Caribbean gal.

If atom bombs and epidemics aren’t enough for you, how about good old-fashioned racism?  That’s right kids, the fifties was before the Civil Rights movement hit its full stride which meant segregated bathrooms, segregated water fountains, and segregated pretty much everything else under “Separate But Equal” laws.  When schools were forced to integrate in 1955, there was so little public support that in Florida, only 13% of policemen surveyed said they were willing to enforce the new law.  It looks like no wise-cracking black friend for Opie.  Thanks a lot, Sheriff Taylor.

Sure, our modern society isn’t perfect, but considering that, if I want to, I don’t need anyone’s permission to move into an shelter-free apartment with a fifty-year-old single black woman as a roommate and not worry about catching polio, I’d say that the current period in time is pretty darn awesome.

Screw the middle ages.