Life in America sucks. It used to suck more. Discuss.

This is essentially a re-up, a slight re-working of something I wrote a little while back — but given how morose I’ve felt about the world these past few weeks, it was kind of a balm to my soul when I re-discovered it yesterday. Perhaps you, too, could use a balm.

Like many, I am often overcome by the sheer suckage in the world at large, and America in particular, in recent times.

It can sometimes be too painful to even turn on the news, knowing that I’ll hear that more people have lost their jobs, and more people are hungry, and more women have been placed in untenable positions, all while our elected officials continue to fight like whiny babies over who’s going to cut how much of the safety net for the poor so that the wealthy can gather yet more wealth (yesterday I learned from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on NPR that the top 1% of American earners now control 25% of the national income; from one of the commenters at Feministe and Vanity Fair, I’ve learned that same 1% controls 40% of the national wealth), and meantime — oh! that’s right! — Gitmo is still open. Honestly, the only people providing a steady stream of good news these days are the American LGBTQ community (yay, death of DADT! Yay, marriage in New York!) — and frankly, that’s just because they have so far to come toward full equality, that every step forward feels huge. So.

It’s at moments like this that I like to time travel a little and remember: The world has always sucked. All the years, all the Administrations, all the social and cultural circumstances. SUUUCKED. Rank xenophobia, catastrophic ignorance, natural disasters — it’s kind of the way things are.

Of course, it’s also the way of things for humans to take steps to decrease the suckage. Sometimes humanity is better at this, sometimes worse; occasionally, it seems to be entirely out of our hands. But mostly, we slog along and push ahead and grunt and groan and weep and gnash our teeth and try our best and bit by bit, we chip away at the worst of things, and slowly, the world gets better.

We’ve seen it in (the admittedly flawed) Health Care Reform and the (admittedly too slow) repeal of DADT. We’ve seen it in crowds of Americans who have stood with their Muslim brothers and sisters, against the (admittedly still frightening) crowds of violent bigots. None of these examples are perfect, none promise a happily-ever-after to anyone.

But that’s the way we do. We can only be human. We can only keep trying — fucking up and trying, fucking up and trying.

The best way to get a good bead on this is to really go back in time. I like to go back about 100 years, because it’s a good round number, and because there’s no better way to see how much things have improved, than to consider what life was like in the good old days.

So let’s start here: In the late 19-aughts, life expectancy for the American woman was a little better than 47 years (which is to say – I’d be nearly dead). For men, it was a touch more than 46, unless the men were African American, in which case, life expectancy was 33. The fourth leading cause of death was “diarrhea, enteritis, and ulceration of the intestine.”

The average worker put in nearly 60 hours a week, and much of the industrial revolution was being implemented by children. In 1909, the Cherry Mine Disaster saw 259 men and boys killed (more than half the mine’s workforce) when a massive fire trapped them underground; twelve would-be rescuers also died.

Only 97 Americans were killed in car accidents in that decade (there were only 8,000 cars), but 115 were lynched. In 1908, race riots erupted in Springfield, Illinois, stemming in part from a false accusation of rape (the accuser later admitted to lying to cover up an affair — which, you know: oy). The black business district was methodically destroyed, forty black homes burned, two black men lynched, and four whites died in days of melee — but then, “anti-black race riots in northern cities were nothing new in the first decade of the twentieth century.” After all, PBS tells us, “race [was] invoked to explain everything: individual character, the cause of criminality, and the natural superiority of ‘higher’ races.” Schools and baseball were segregated, and it goes without saying that Barack Obama would not have been able to vote, nor, indeed, allowed through the front door of the White House.

Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have been allowed to vote, either, and had she attended the first suffrage parade, in 1910, she would have likely be wearing an organ-crushing corset to define her waist. Higher education was almost unheard of for the women of the time — in 1900, 2.8% of American women attended college; twenty years later, that number had risen to 7.6% (my mother likes to remind me that both of my grandmothers are represented by that statistic). And of course, for every 1,000 live births, six to nine women died in childbirth; about 100 of the babies would die before their first birthday.

All this, and Americans still hadn’t faced the First World War, the 1918 flu pandemic, the Great Depression, or the Second World War.

Do you know how long 100 years is? Zip. It’s the potential life-expectancy of a baby born today (and given that infant mortality rates have dropped more than 90% in the last century, those babies are already starting out with a better shot).

So, yeah: A whole lot sucks in America — and frankly, it sucks a lot more for people in other places around the globe. Yesterday’s post about “breast ironing,”  the horrifying tales of starvation out of East Africa (not to mention Israel/Palestine) are all powerful reminders that no matter how much better things get here, there is still much to worry us elsewhere.

Human history suggests, however, that as terrible as things always are, the suckage grows less over time — because we put our minds to making things better. As a woman who spends a lot of time advocating for causes that appear to be demonstrably lost, it does my heart good to remember that, sometimes.

Crossposted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles and Feministe.

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Posted by emilylhauser on July 28, 2011

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/life-in-america-sucks-it-used-to-suck-more-discuss/