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ANDY ROONEY
©2003 Tribune Media Services, Inc. Better By Far Sometimes, when I worry about little things like the future of mankind, I deliberately turn my thoughts to how great life can be for us in 2003. I did a morning radio interview last week, demeaning myself trying to sell my new book, and the interviewer asked if I thought things were better for people than they used to be. I said "Better," but I wasn’t articulate explaining why I thought so. Life is better than it was for our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and ancestors because invention has enabled us to fill our lives with more good things and more interesting times, and with less onerous physical labor. We live much longer because our doctors know more and have better medicine. We’re filling those extra years with five times as much living as people living in 1900 got into one year. One hundred years ago, a woman never left the house most days. She After dinner, 100 years ago, people either went to bed or sat in the dark. Some read with difficulty by the Sure, we have it better. Thomas Edison’s light bulb turns night to day with a flip of the switch. We read the newspaper and watch what went on in the world on a picture box across from our chair. We are entertained, enlightened. If we don’t like what we see, we can change what we’re watching without moving any more than a finger. We have done an amazing job Houses that were once warmed in freezing winter weather by the spotty heat thrown off by wood-burning I often look at old buildings in New York City that are five and six stories high. Someone had to live on the top floor a hundred years ago. The only way to get to the upper floors before elevators were invented in 1852 was to walk up carrying what you needed. In summer heat, a top floor apartment without air conditioning (invented fairly recently in 1911) often reached 120 degrees. This week, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of flight. Travel that once took days or months by foot, horse-drawn carriage or sailing ship, takes a small part of one day. Great as the Wright Brothers invention has been in providing us with mobility, airplanes do not compare with automobiles in the convenience they provide us Traveling farther and more often doesn’t necessarily add to our lives, but travel helps us get to know more about how others live, and the more we know, the better we’re able to make our own lives. We borrow the best of what we learn. Travel has improved food. We Inventions have created a world our grandparents and great-grandparents could not have imagined. The good old days were not that good. That’s what I should have told the man who interviewed me on radio.
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