The Paradox

I just read "The Spoiled Under 30 Crowd". I grew up during the Great Depression and could write something called, "The Spoiled Under 60 Crowd". Although everything written in the 30's thing rings true, it is still written by a spoiled kid.
When I was a kid, circa 1935, we didn't have the Internet either, but no one told me about the library. No one told me that it was a place of learning and the world could be mine if I used that library correctly. Everyone was too busy wondering where their next meal was coming from.
My mother and I were on what was then called Home Relief. My father had taken off two months before I was born so my mother and I were at the mercy of the State of New York. In those days, mercy was pretty scarce. We would receive a Home Relief check every month for about $20.00 as I recall, but we didn't have to buy food with that if we liked potatoes. We could go down to the Home Relief store with the sawdust on the floor and get a 10 pound bag of potatoes as part of our Home Relief benefits. So, with our $20.00 we would live on things like SPAM, which was only ten cents a can.
I can't remember how, but we managed to buy a radio, which was really a luxury. We would sit around, stare at the radio and listen to programs such as The Shadow, The Green Hornet and, of course, The Lone Ranger. My mother and I used to go to the movies a lot. Movie theaters charged ten cents for adults and five cents for kids. You would see TWO feature films, a newsreel and a cartoon. It was quite a good deal, but not as good as on Saturday afternoons. You would get your two feature films and maybe two or three cartoons, but the greatest treat was, you got the current chapter of whatever serial was playing. Flash Gorden would do battle with Ming the Merciless or maybe it was Superman doing battle with Lex Luthor. Today . . . well, when you take nostalgia into the equation, it ain't nearly as much fun going to the movies and if you take the cost of a movie ticket, parking fees and gasoline into the equation, it ain't no fun at all.
Today kids MUST have a cell phone. How could any young person possibly survive without a cell phone? My mother and I didn't get a telephone actually in the house until I was eighteen years old and, believe it or not, it was one of the biggest moments in my life. Instead of standing up in a phone booth I could actually talk to my friends while I was sitting in the livingroom. It didn't get any classier than that for an eighteen year old at that time. Today's kids can look back at that time and snigger, but with all the friends I had, no one drove drunk, no one took any form of drugs, no one got pregnant and, best of all, no innocent kid ever got shot in a drive by shooting.
When you take into consideration the really important things, life was a helluva lot better back then.