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This week, you can read countless articles on the medical condition of 2022, from the war in Ukraine to mass shootings, hyper-inflation, and yet another nasty election.
Nothing deserves more than a year of contempt. In terms of New Year’s Eve, it seems all the optimism everyone felt a year before him when the clock struck midnight last New Year’s Eve was in vain.
But that doesn’t keep anyone from dizzying about what’s just over the horizon. Times Square in New York City jumps. Full of smiles.
Are we a world full of Charlie Browns happily chasing a football that keeps getting pulled apart at the last minute? is it being done?
No, we’re incurable optimists, and that’s a good thing. People seem to have boundless faith that we can create a better tomorrow.
At this time of year, it’s useful to step into the dusty time machine of Newspapers.com’s archives of newspapers and learn what people were thinking and worrying 100 years ago.
don’t be afraid You will find a world not so familiar.
For example, on December 30, 1922, the Deseret News published an article in which statistician Roger W. Babson predicted business conditions in 1923.
“The signs are not clear and the usual barometers seem to contradict each other,” the report said. Babson told the crowd that the country was “neither at the height of a boom nor at the bottom of a recession.”
“If we were at either of these extremes, there is no question what the next move would be.
This covers almost all bases. You can’t go wrong with that.
Other events of the day foreshadowed something darker.
On New Year’s Day 1923, the world was contemplating the creation of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Lenin had his third stroke in 1922, but he still managed to appoint Joseph his Stalin as general secretary of the Russian Communist Party. Few could understand what this meant, let alone what Benito Mussolini’s new dictatorship in Italy would bring to Europe.
In January, the first Nazi Party Congress will be held in Munich.
Still, that New Year’s Day, an editorial writer for the Deseret News said:
“There are two things we should never worry about. If he cannot help them, they should be set aside and not allowed to get in the way of a person’s happiness or growth.
Good advice, that. Worrying is said to be like paying interest on money you haven’t yet borrowed. Or, as 20th-century Arizona columnist Elma Bombeck put it, “Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something, but it never gets you anywhere.”
At dawn in 1923, there was little reason to let worries ruin your day. There will be plenty of time set aside for that in the coming decades.
And speaking of prophecies, another editorial of the day asked, “What about the future?”
“The past eight years have been full of novelties and frightening experiences for the world. It is boiling with the political fervor and social derailments that are likely to erupt in a political revolution.”
Sometimes the future looks easier than we think.
Meanwhile, the New York Times, after running several stories about how Prohibition made New Years boring, made the world a “safer, more pleasant, more livable place…” Louis・The 100th anniversary of Pasteur’s birth.
Already dead 27 years ago, Pasteur discovered the principle of vaccination and developed pasteurization, a method of protecting milk from bacterial contamination.
And it shows one of the key points history has been trying to teach us.
People in 1923 were optimistic, even though it was New Year’s Day, but they didn’t know about the coming Great Depression, World War II, the invention of the atomic bomb, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
But they seemed quite aware that Pasteur, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, or Steve Jobs are sometimes sent in their lives.
It takes a unique kind of blindness to miss that life today, while certainly not perfect, is in most physical aspects better than it was a century ago. Few people want to go back there forever, even if he doesn’t know what lies ahead of us today.
So go ahead. Continue to drag on all the tragedies of years gone by. We still ask Lucy to tee the ball up and kick it full force into a glorious future.
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