That's the Way It Used To Be

When I was a young man I composed a song that bore the exact title of this article. In it, I lamented the fact that everything was so much more expensive than in the old days. Gone were the buffalo nickel candy bars, the cheap suits and shoes, the affordable car where one did not need a loan and a home in which payments were timed to a typical thirty year career working for a single company. That vision has been superseded by modern economics, guided by Madison Avenue prophets and a financial mechanism once widely considered to be usury. A home today, assuming you haven't got $100,000 up front, costs three times as much considering the actuarial tables. I can even remember a time when G-d cost pennies and politicians a few dollars. Thieves were satisfied then with pittances compared to today, when greedy educated individuals successfully steal billions. There was even a time when war, always an exorbitant outlay of resources, cost a great deal less than the pervasive expenditure we now have before us. It certainly seems that money and costs have spiraled up into a towering, insatiable glutton, even as the fantasy and science fiction writers have led us into a brave new world.

Or have they?

In 1900, a silver Morgan dollar could buy you twelve loaves of bread along with a jar of mayonnaise, a head of lettuce and all the lunch meat you could want. Today, if you can find that same coin, the one minted in 1900, assuming it is in pristine condition for those who collect such things, you can also purchase twelve loaves of bread and the items mentioned from cashing in at a dealer of antiquities. In other words, absolutely nothing has changed. That, to me, seems a bit ironic.

I remember the three cent stamp, purple with the head of the statue of liberty on it along with the one cent post card. In those days, there was never a question of the mail getting through, no matter what. It was the Pony Express and mailmen took pride in delivering things. But now that we have parlayed Benjamin Franklin's vision with the fantasies of a highly sophisticated mechanized system, it is quite possible not to get mail, or to receive that which belongs to someone else or even be surprised with letter bombs or diseases.

When I was a young man, I purchased the newspaper and read the columns and editorials voraciously, puzzling out the crosswords, delving any witticisms in the comics or political cartoons, glancing at advertisements, perusing the job offers and scanning the sport's pages for my favorite teams. Nowadays I turn on the Internet for free and get the same things with much less effort. I don't have to wait for the newsboy nor the rain; neither do I have to miss important news that I may not have caught on television and I don't have to worry about missing sections in the Sunday paper. It seems to me that we have undergone a significant change because of the computer.

Or have we?

I still have to pay the provider for its service, America On Line in my case. Occasionally, it breaks down and knocks me off, a ploy perhaps to get me to invest in DSL. When it does my routine is quite disturbed, like the times when the newsboy was ill. It makes me wonder whether John Von Neumann or Alan Turing, the fathers of the computer, ever paused to consider the ramifications of what they were inventing or how it might affect people? Did they suspect that software could play a role of such power that it might filter its way into every domicile on earth with lasting influence? Perhaps they did not anticipate the failures that now regulate our lives, the ones that bring our desire for news of daily occurrences right back to where it used to be. I suspect that the way things used to be are nothing less than the way things are, but viewed through a different lens. Reminiscing about it makes me wonder whether or not we are applying the visions of the future the way those brilliant writers intended or manipulating them into the narrow peripheral glimpses of people with distinct other agendas.