But problems occur when we have only our pasts to use in comparisons with new trends, facts, and issues. I see that Colorado is considering banning gas-powered lawn equipment due to continuing problems in air quality. This proposal doesn't affect me personally, though I'm sure the company that mows and trims and waters our little corner of paradise is not thrilled. They would have to invest in lots of new equipment (and, really, that seems needed, based on the uneven grass cutting we observe most weeks).
I don't miss mowing the lawn, honestly, but I have many memories of mowing in my youth and middle age, from push mowers to gas mowers. We even owned a snow blower for a time that could handle 27-inch deep drifts. I recall having to pull the cord on our crappy mower as many as two dozen times to get the engine to catch... pulling until I wanted to weep in frustration. Ah, the good old days.
The United States currently has a significant part of the population longing for days past when America was great (we lump them together as the MAGA fans), but when researchers ask those folks to specify exactly when that mythical highpoint occurred, there is no clear answer. Not the Depression, surely. So maybe the 1950s... though that golden age of white people left out a large chunk of humanity. Or maybe during some obscure decade in the 1800s... though not the Civil War.
What many people long for, ironically, never existed other than to benefit a very few. "Hey, remember when people dressed up to fly on a plane?"
On a more personal level, Kathleen and I recently were forced to confront the "new" world of streaming and the necessity of navigating varied services. We had become quite comfortable with depending upon Xfinity to bundle almost all our TV choices into one simple (if always too large) bill each month.
Imagine our surprise when a series of events led to our needing to change our Xfinity plan and suddenly we could not access HBO... and our DVR was suddenly limited to 10 hours from the previous 100 (though we soon learned we could just click on a button and return to those 100 hours, for a monthly fee added to our bill).
After several frustrating online chats with Xfinity agents who clearly were copying and pasting prepared comments, we finally drove to a local Xfinity store to talk to a human. He must have been fielding complaints quite regularly about the changes to the previous bundling options because he was all too ready to recommend we check out local library for DVDs to play (for free!) if we were so upset by the service.
We were taken aback, partly because we were not upset... just confused. He lectured us about reading the small print on our monthly bills (which are online) that had been warning Xfinity customers that, basically, the old days were over. Xfinity now has the goal of simply being our gateway to the wonders of the internet. Content? The finances are so messy that the company has simply dropped out. I assume all internet providers are the same.
We also had to come to terms with the truth that our basic access to the internet, which we value and which is quite fast (so fast that even a slight delay or interruption is met with quiet cursing), would cost as much as what we were paying before, but without the Big Ten Network or HBO or Showtime, or... You get the idea.
In the end, I went online and subscribed to MAX, which supplants HBO, which still exists (I guess) but is part of this larger streaming service. Just this month I subscribed to Paramount+, mostly because I wanted access to all the new Star Trek series that are exclusive to that service.
Apple+ upped its cost from $49.95 per year by $20... still a bargain. Add in Netflix and we are paying about $48 per month (we will add the Comcast sports package to watch Iowa games late in August at $9.99/month).
Logically, the over $300 we are now paying per month for TV, internet, and phone is actually quite a value, and I know that. But my gut argues that TV used to be free and that I am somehow being "taken" by the greedy streaming services.
When we talk about this with our children (who are not all that young anymore), they just launch into tales of how they pursue strategies that involve waiting until they have several shows to watch on a particular platform and then binge them in a month or a few weeks, and then cancel and move to the next steamer. Some day, today will be their longed-for past golden era.
We prefer the normal two-months "free" that an annual subscription includes and are not fans of flitting from service to service, thinking we would need a complex spreadsheet just to keep track of the game. Isn't life supposed to be a bit simpler as we age, after all?
It occurs to me that many of the MAGA nut cases imagine sometime early in their lives as that "great America" that they long for. But we had four networks growing up - and one was PBS - when we were young. Kathleen only had three most of her youth, due to the nearest NBC station not being close enough for their antenna to pick up.
That means she never watched the original Star Trek series in the late 1960s, which may account for her suspicion that our Paramount+ subscription is not necessary. But we do have a vague plan to revisit all the Star Trek movies, in order, sometime this winter. After all, we have the DVDs... a technology that our children have mostly abandoned.
Somehow, DVDs are now part of the good old days. And so are we.
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