OT - The last of the Few. RIP.

[ramAnag]

You do hear older generations complaining the world isn't the same and is far more dangerous but is it? Does it not appear to be because news is 24/7 these days? My dad for one will say how bad the world is, but he was born just before WW2, a time when frightened young men were forced to go and die for their countries. We used to hang people.

As you say some things change for the better, some worse. People talk as though there was no before the 20th century. Trump talks about immigration, in a country born out of immigration only a few hundred years ago.

I think you make a fair point, Sith. Never forget, when I first started working in the area of child protection, my late mother telling me ‘there’s nothing new about these *****philes you know’ and proceeding to tell me of encounters she’d narrowly avoided as a young girl in Liverpool ninety plus years ago now. Maybe one difference was that her brothers (my uncles) sorted it their way in those days.
Likewise I grew up on the edge of Saddleworth Moor and we all know what Hindley and Brady were getting up to in the 1960’s there - despite which I still remember ‘playing out’ with a freedom that I rarely see my own grandchildren enjoying today.
As you say, eighty plus years ago millions of our young men, like Paddy Hemingway, were being sent off to war and knife crime was relatively prolific in our 19th century cities.
So maybe we do overreact these days, partly as a result of the bombardment of 24/7 news, although I do think that, politically, we are in very dangerous times and that the internet - which in many ways should be a force for good - has become a dangerous beast in the hands of the unscrupulous.