I am trying to put into an understandable context that would explain some minor differences between a then and a now when the then is but a few decades ago and the now is this present time. Is it the money, the second car, the wife that works, the divorce rate, the lack of values, the educational system, the relentless attacks from outside forces on our moral compass, or just a glitch in the cycle of world’s journey between phases of good and evil?
Some years ago I wrote a short documentation of how the world was forever changed with the arrival of the first merry-go-round. It was my counter-point to a PBS special featuring James Burk titled Connections and followed the idea of a triggering effect. Something such as the invention of the plow allowed people to remain in one place rather than being yet another member of a hunter-gatherer tribe. Other topics included how beer allowed for the new generation of refrigerators.
I of course not being a tenured professor at a major university with a few doctorates in history under my expanding beltline took a different view and decided more than all else the invention of amusements had done more to change the face of the planet that anything else humanly imaginable.
Ergo the illustrious merry-go-round enters stage left. I can visualize it all now the end of the harvest season and the workers of the fields gather their goods and head to the city inside the walls of earth and stone. Their children still tired and worn from a long sleepless night as they all pitched in to assist in the loading of the carts of wood. Weary eyes are brought back to life with the sight of a circle of oak which does nothing more than go round and round. This is a father’s dream to forego his earnings to a traveling peddler who offers a smile, a laugh, and cheer to boy and girl with the spin of a horizontal wheel.
Lance Britt