Mennonite Weekly Review

If I made a list of what was better about life 30 to 40 years ago, a few things would come to mind, not necessarily in order of importance.

Goering

National parks were much less crowded when my parents took us there on summer vacations. We enjoyed the parks without shuttles and didn’t worry about sun exposure.

When we came back from vacation, we didn’t check the answering machine for messages or log on to see what emails needed quick replies. We might get a thank-you from someone who received one of our vacation postcards with a hand-written note on the back.

It’s also easy for me to list things that are better about life today than in the past.

I travel more than my parents did when they were my age, and thus enjoy more beautiful landscapes and cultural awakenings. As much as the Internet imprisons us with the urgency of communication, it invigorates our lives with pulsating information and ideas.

My husband, Wynn, notes how our lives are distinctly different — and, he believes, better — than his parents’. His mother fulfilled expectations of her day when she gave up a beloved high school teaching career to marry her husband. Wynn’s father practiced law briefly before giving it up entirely to return to his family farm — in contrast to Wynn, who has for 30 years combined teaching and academic administration with first his family farm and later my own.

In 1990 my mother survived a heart attack and lived 17 more years with the medical advances of bypass surgery. My husband and I have the potential of longer life spans than our parents, who exceeded the lifetimes of their parents before them.

Is life better today than in the past? Many Americans don’t think so, and this pessimism is increasingly shaping our national politics — how we view immigration, government spending and a host of other issues.

The Christian Science Monitor recently outlined “The (Surprisingly Upbeat) State of the World,” describing key areas where the globe is progressing.

Poverty is shrinking, with the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day projected to be 883 million in 2015, compared with 1.4 billion in 2005 and 1.8 billion in 1990, according to World Bank statistics.