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Shared from Facebook. I've been thinking along these lines. My grandmother was born in 1905 and my grandfather in 1902. I wondered how they dealt with the Spanish Flu epidemic. I don't remember any stories about it. The great depression, yes. The had three house fires and lost everything while their children were growing up.

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For a small amount of perspective at this moment, imagine you were born in 1900. When you are 14, World War I starts, and ends on your 18th birthday with 22 million people killed. Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until you are 20. Fifty million people die from it in those two years. Yes, 50 million.

When you're 29, the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, global GDP drops 27%. That runs until you are 33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy. When you turn 39, World War II starts. You aren’t even over the hill yet.

When you're 41, the United States is fully pulled into WWII. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perish in the war and the Holocaust kills six million. At 52, the Korean War starts and five million perish.

At 64 the Vietnam War begins, and it doesn’t end for many years. Four million people die in that conflict. Approaching your 62nd birthday you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War. Life on our planet, as we know it, could well have ended. Great leaders prevented that from happening.

As you turn 75, the Vietnam War finally ends. Think of everyone on the planet born in 1900. How do you survive all of that? A kid in 1985 didn’t think their 85 year old grandparent understood how hard school was. Yet those grandparents (and now great grandparents) survived through everything listed above.

Perspective is an amazing art. Let’s try and keep things in perspective. Let’s be smart, help each other out, and we will get through all of this. In the history of the world, there has never been a storm that lasted. This too, shall pass.

Feel free to share.

HippieChick58 9 May 15
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The real and undeniable perspective is that during all those years the human population continued to rise exponentially. [globalcitizen.org] scroll down to the graph and set cursor on the line to get a view of the specific year.

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I had seen that on facebook. Of course what struck me was the similarities to the present. I've tried to tell people since the late 1980's that we are heading back to the 1900's if we continue to follow the economic plans of those in WA DC. Starting with Reagan and deregulation. So damn sad and frustrating to see people so hoodwinked and continuing to vote against their own best interests.

@Fred_Snerd I dearly hope so. We are so much better connected now than back in the early and mid 1900's. Sadly that connectivity has given us the hub of propaganda porn fox media and oann, etc.

It's disappointing how bad we are at learning from the past (or at all).
We have been amazingly fortunate in our opportunities over recent years but it's tragic how we seem determined to throw them all away because of our stupidity and short sightedness.

Here is a graph from Denver's 1918 flu data I've shown several times -- why don't we learn?:

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