It’s not like the old days.
In the old days the air sparkled and was full of birds. Tweeting meant a noise, a natural noise, heard with ears, not eyes. We played in mud and out in the street and illness was proper, wholesome illness and broken arms didn’t mean a week off school while a health and safety appraisal occurred.
In the old days. When I was a kid. It was all better then.
In the old days, when kids knew what acid rain meant and had seen the pictures of the forests that had succumbed to it. When mumps and whooping cough kept us off school for weeks at a time, when a sports trip for an elite teenage athlete I knew was cancelled because the country was wrestling with the immediate aftermath of a massive nuclear explosion. When our television was filled with images of people too hungry even to keep moving and our only defence, the only way to help, was for some people to get up and sing.
They did sing though – and they did help.
In the old days.
The following video contains some images of pregnancy and infants; my loss readers might want to approach with caution.
Truth is, the old days had their problems. There is plenty to look back on and mourn from our 70’s childhoods but plenty to be grateful now. Four of my five living children are living and thriving only because of modern medicine; it couldn’t save one of the six, but there are mothers through history and alive today who would count me blessed for my fortune in keeping five so far. We are learning all the time how to make our world a healthier, safer, more sustainable place. We’ve got a long way to go and many attitudes to change but the knowledge we gain is making a difference to the future of our children. And I never played in the street anyway; my children have more freedom than I ever did thanks to the technology of the affordable mobile phone.
Across the world, new technologies are growing more food, providing more water, getting to disaster areas faster and more efficiently. The power of the tweet can rally the money, expertise and items needed in a place where horror has reared a head. And women like me, bereft and alone, find help and support from the comfort of their own homes, where once they would have sat alone, broken, helpless.
It’s not such a bad place to have a baby, bring up a child. It could be worse.
Project Sunlight, sponsored by Unilever aims to encourage people to make small changes in how they live and act to help make our world a sustainable place for our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.It aims to make sustainable living achievable and desirable by helping people to look at the possibilities for living well and within our natural means. Unilever, a leading brand in home and personal care products, will make a donation to assist in bringing school meals and clean drinking water to 2 million children as part of Project Sunlight.
The project hopes you will SEE the film, ACT by making small changes (turn off a light, reduce food waste, help at a school, drop some money in a collecting tin for a charity you believe in) and JOIN the movement at Project Sunlight. You can find out more at the Project Sunlight Facebook page.
Disclosure: this post is sponsored by Unilever.
