Looking back 100 years ago in this country, did you know....
The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years. Two out of every 10 adults could not read nor write and only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school. More than 95 percent of all births took place in the home and there were 230 reported murders in the entire U.S.
Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub. Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. Most women washed their hair once a month and used Borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were available over the counter at the local corner drugstores. The pharmacists said, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health!"
The three leading causes of death were: 1. Influenza 2. Tuberculosis 3. Diarrhea.
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented yet. There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day and women couldn't vote.
The average U.S. wage was 22 cents per hour. An accountant could expect to earn $2,000 per year, a dentist $2,500, a veterinarian $3,000, and a mechanical engineer $4,000 per year.
There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles of paved roads. Fuel for cars was sold in drug stores and the maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph. It had been 6 years since the Wright brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk and the American flag had 45 stars. The population of Las Vegas, Nevada, was 30.
What do you think the country will be like in another 100 years?
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Comments: 39
In a hundred years, China might not be here!
If things keep on as they have been going in the US healthcare arena & conspiracies surrounding vaccines, I suspect we will be back to dying of totally preventable diseases.
I'm waiting for the first cases of polio to rear their ugly head in the US. Maybe when mothers start seeing their children crippled and dying from that disease, they'll start to wake up. Every medical treatment has some sort of risk associated with it. Every pharmaceutical company is out there to make money. The key is good medical healthcare by competent professional doctors and nurses. And our population is losing access to that care daily due to the greed of the insurance companies and private medicine. It will not be terrorism from without that will defeat us in the end - it will be stupidity from within.
I wonder how that will be in 100 years? better or worse?
I bet we still won't have hover cars.
Very perceptive of you. You can laugh and cry at the same time.
Great to see, Carla, where we've come from last century.
States that allowed OTC narcotics had people sign a register in the pharmacy and laws limited how much people could buy.
We will have become smart enough to vote on-line on things proposed for our own good, and politicians will be out of work.
We will have ombudsmen for everything, and clearing houses to post best practices for everything.
The pharmo-banko-oilio-chemo-people will have lost their ability to threaten to sue people for talking about their own health practices on the internet (celebrity TV will be extinct--those who subscribed will have died of various cancers caused by the products they bought).
We will all have re-forested town centers kind of like the square where Forest Gump sat on the bench.
We will eat lots of mushrooms since it will have become legal to talk about their healing properties.
Hemp will once again grow around the Pentagon, which will have been turned into a poodle-grooming, latte-sipping place, with a few micro-brew-pubs and bike-repair shoppes thrown in along with sail-board purveyors and raw-food restaurants.
Vegans live a long time, dontcha know.
For that reason, I kind of like reading predictions of gloom, knowing that whatever scenario is being described is very unlikely to happen just like that. I understand, rationally, that this unlikeliness was in existence before the prediction was made, and that making the prediction doesn't affect the real-life probability of the event. It still feels comforting in a way--if we predicted it, it must be wrong. :)