Then and now

[Dispatcher]

I have been lucky enough to be alive for 54 years. And still luckier to have remembered much of it. Things change over time. And change is a mixed bag.
Most of it is good though.
When I was in grade school, we had Atomic Bomb drills. It was during the '60s in the height of the cold war. A special alarm would go off, and students would be moved into the hallway. Once there, we were instructed to get on our knees and cover our heads with our arms.
And remember...don't look at the flash of the Atomic blast. It will make you go blind. Of course, they left out the little detail that the radiation would have toasted us all like marshmallows. But, at least we weren't going to go blind before we vaporized.
Now we have the terrorists trying to kill us. And thanks to the Iraq war, there are many more of them, and we are not really any safer now then we were pre 9/11. Still, I'd rather have some Jihadist trying to kill me than some Soviet leader who has nukes.

And of course, everything cost more now than it did back when I was a kid. But wages are higher too. The only real difference is that you could get a manufacturing job right out of high school and make a decent living and now you can't. If you don't have that college sheepskin now you are screwed. And if you majored in the wrong subject, you are still screwed.

Cars were cooler then. Much cooler. And you could tell the make of a car just by it's tail lights. But cars were also much more dangerous then.
No shoulder belts, no airbags, and no crumple zones. If you hit something, your body absorbed the shock. And a lot of people died.
Of course, there are a lot more cars on the road now, and the odds are you still will be in an accident at some time in your life. But now, you may actually survive it.

Well, that's my take on the past and the present. Of course, a lot more has changed over the years, but my point is that a lot of the change I have lived through has been positive. And I have been lucky enough to see the before AND the after.