“Each Time History Repeats Itself, the Price Goes Up”

STORY BY:
YEAR: 1971
LOCATION: Winnipeg, MB

Peter from Winnipeg shared several thoughts by email:
"1. The little boxes, the pill, the massive move to the city, the advertising, all meant that we do so much with our brains, so little with our hands, that we have lost a sense of self achievement. It was all s embraced with the post war military standardization. The result is social change that has happened so rapidly changed that none of us seem to be able to keep up with our role in society. More has changed in my lifetime, than did in all of history before me. It is a challenge for our kids, who need a reliable home base.
2. While we can define big events as starting and ending, it really doesn’t happen that way. There are always early adopters, and laggards. I can remember schoolyard (grade 7, 1971) when, with in the shade of the 50’s, my friends held out that ‘no wife of mine will ever work’. We seem to have solved half that problem, women are free to get educated, hold good jobs, contribute, and in Canada, at equal pay (more or less). But, no where, then or since, have we addressed that a whole generation of boys, with every cell if their body, truly believed it was there job to ‘serve and protect’ their wife and kids.
3. You touched on the 2nd war. On the American and Japanese. That is a North American story. Not a world war. The true fallout of the 2nd goes on today. So many Jews lost their lives, that it is named ‘The Holocaust’. But sadly, as we have become so infatuated with that genocide, there have been at least 23, largely ignored, genocides since. In the words Ronald Wright quoted from a washroom wall. “Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up”.
4. I used to worry that given the age we have children at now, we were ignoring evolution in raising a generation of kids that did not now their grandchildren. That is still a concern I hold, both for the kids and for their parents, but is has moved into second place. Now I see us raising kids that don’t even know their parents. The common story is that kids come from a family break-up, and have significant others that come from family break-ups. Each parent takes on a new partner. The easiest example to follow is when Christmas comes round and the ‘kids’ have four sets of parents to visit with. It is simply not possible to spend enough meaningful time with all and one way or another choices have to be made. But the kids are forced to make those choices every day. It can become so overwhelming, both for the kids, and the parents who compete for time with their kids, that our kids are left stranded without parental guidance of any kind.
I truly enjoyed the performance, enjoyed the opportunity to speak. My 18-year-old son was with me. And you provided me an opportunity to understand a bit more of the lives my parents endured, to give me a better start in life.
Ending on a lighter note: Street Concerts in Winnipeg were a fabulous time, that provided a much richer understanding of being alive than recorded music, even much better recorded music, ever will."Thanks for sharing, Peter.