Today’s Sensibilities

You know, I get think people get way too involved with their personal agenda to really understand the real world as it existed in the past.  They judge people and situations in the past by today’s sensibilities and form conclusions that are have absolutely no bearing on the truth.  But far be it from me to rain on their parade – right?  Like that is going to happen.

That is not to defend that actions of the past, it is just to recognize that the past is the past.  The situations and world that people lived in were different and the rules were different.  Some people will innocently and unrealistically think that they would still act the same as they would today are sorely mistaken.  That is a fact.

I think that the first time I really got my fur up on this was when I tried to read “Clan of the Cave Bear” some years ago.  Good book when I started it.  Did not get very far when on of the protagonists started having modern women’s liberation thoughts.  I threw the book into the corner of my living room where it stayed until I moved.  I may have been a good modern book but if you were wanting to representing prehistory, be honest.  I know the books sold well but so do a lot of other crap that has no bearing on reality.

On a more realistic note, I remember I had a conversation with a coworker several years ago.  I was working for a family-owned company at the time.  The owner was a decent person.  He treated his employees well, he paid better than average benefits, and even if his pay scale was a little on the low side it was in the average range.  The comment I made to my coworker was that, despite the owner being a nice guy, that he would employ child labor if it were still legal. My coworker just about gave birth to a Guernsey right then and there.  That is until I explained myself.  My reasoning was that our company was still employing manual assembly and if child labor were still the norm, financial pressure would have required us to use child labor in order to stay financially viable.  No matter what our employer’s sensibility, in order to stay in business, child labor would have been required.

That got me to thinking, a whole lot.  Have you heard of Carolina Gold Rice.  Probably not.  It is starting to come back as an artisan rice.  But at one time it was a major, major rice cultivar and amassed large fortunes.  Problem is that is labor intensive.  Thus it was successful until the end of the American Civil War in South Carolina.  Afterwards, not so much.  I would agree, small loss for the freeing of slaves.  But here is the point I am making; if you owned a rice plantation in South Carolina, no matter what your opinion on slavery would have been, you would have owned slaves.  Either that or bankruptcy.  Today’s idealist would say that is a no-brainer, bankruptcy in a heartbeat but that is bullcrap and we all know it.

Another thought comes to mind.  Take a man named Lew Wetzel.  Unless you have read Zane Grey, you probably have never heard of him.  If you have read Zane Grey you probably think he was a fictional character.  He was real, very real.  He was partially the idealized Zane Grey character and partially a psychopathic monster.  In a nutshell, he was a frontiersman in the Late 18th/Early 19th century that had a well-deserved reputation of never meeting an Indian that he did not kill.  Probably why there is so little known about him today.  History kind of swept him under the rug except for some of his more famous exploits.  Today. he would have either been executed or incarcerated in a mental institution for the rest of his life.  In his time, he was a hero.

So be careful to judge today as today and yesterday as yesterday.  As a parting thought.  I heard some (possibly) well-meaning members of congress saying that Bill Clinton should have resigned over the Lewinsky affair.  I also remember that a local “friend” of Monica’s who said that she told him that when she got her appointment she was going to get a new pair of kneepads.  A matter of perspective.