What were they thinking?

In the dog days of summer when it is too hot to squat, my mind wanders back to what people thought about before.

My parents grew up with the horse until the car arrived. The telephone and electricity was a luxury. Chickens were raised in the backyard for Sunday dinner and radio was only on for a few hours. Indoor plumbing was just being established. They were introduced to the refrigerator, television, automobiles, department stores, shopping malls, elevators, escalators and aluminum siding. Knowledge was delivered to the doorstep every morning with a brief b&w presentation at 6PM with a barrage of propaganda on the radio. My father, according to history, attended a college but no diploma was found. The yellow pages were printed as a beginning to the service economy.

Now their parents were just out of the civil war. They were rebuilding battlefields and caring for the thousands of injured and maimed. Dogs and horses wandered the streets with their defecation smell mixed in with the heavy garments and no deodorant. Entertainment was a newspaper whenever it was printed and a family gathering around the piano. The church offered the spread of gossip mixed with fantasy.

And their parents were farmers. Everyone was a farmer for the supermarket had not be established, so you grew and raised what to eat or starved. If you wanted to build a house, you chopped down a tree without a chain saw. Only the occasional mail order catalog and limited reading skills education turned for someone else to teach. What values were established passed down by elders. Entertainment was simple wooden whittling and increasing the family to work the field and take up arms for protection. 911 hadn’t been thought of yet.

In other words, life was tough and survival was (and is) our constant drive to move on until the final breath is taken.

Unless you have diaries or letters sharing the thoughts of family, one can only guess of what they thought and what they went through.

How did they handle this heat without air conditioning, yet they did? When they took a day trip to the general store to find not only a bag of grain was available but also imported lace could be brought home to examined and duplicated by women who manufactured their own clothing.

What was their thought process to go buy a cow and a horse and a human? Why didn’t they enslave indigenous people or were they too difficult to sacrum to the invaders who stole their land?

The society of the time was accepting domestic violence for women were second-class citizens and dominated by males. The law of the jungle accepted by the church? What went on in the bedroom was not discussed.

Other than the Farmer’s Almanac, folks had to just the weather by looking up at the clouds and listening to the animals who seem to have a six-sense on weather patterns. No insurance for heavy rains bringing floods or tornadoes or hurricanes. FEMA wouldn’t show up so it was on the family to clean up and recover.

With better education to read and right and rithmatic, people started coming out of the darkness and wander into schools and libraries. Folks started to form cities sharing manufacturing, education, housing and religion while building infrastructures as electricity, water, sewerage and trash removal.

As the family tribes came out of the woods, society changed. Still people wanted to survive which meant assembling and conforming and following the crowd.

My ancestries must have made some good decisions to continue the family tree, what were they thinking?

As they were exposed to more information, women started demanding rights, the former enslaved and now ostracized and restrained to reservations of minimal segregation housing were demanding emancipation and the secrets from the bedroom started coming out of the closet, what were they thinking.

One can only accept changes with understanding and vision. Change doesn’t have to be frightful or threatening but opening the possibilities.