The other day I was talking to my sister about how differently we understand childhood experiences now that we’re older. New information and perspectives have completely changed my memories and what they mean to me.
It’s no wonder I struggle to understand what other people’s lives were like when I don’t know what my own life is like.
I’ve been reading Ruin & Renewal: Civilizing Europe After WW2, and it’s striking to think about the state of Europe after the war.
Yes, I’ve learned about this before, but somehow the facts didn’t really sink in and create a coherent vision. It was all statistics and pictures of rubble and individual memoirs.
Battle of Berlin, May 1945. Two elderly German men, one wearing the armband signifying blindness, the other his helper, sitting on a crate amid the rubble. Photo by Yevgeny Khaldei via Shutterstock.
The premise of Ruin & Renewal is that civilization had effectively collapsed in Europe. The rule of law was meaningless as the black market took over. Packs of "wolf children" roamed the streets and the forests. The continent was overwhelmed with refugees and millions more were homeless and impoverished. The toll of famine and infectious disease were amplified by violence and mental instability.
The native lands of colonial powers were flooded with international charity and relief workers. These relief workers found a world of deprivation, despair, and chaos.
The situation was so dire that the victors sent aid not only to the victims but also to the villains. During the Nuremberg Trials aid was being sent — by governments and sympathetic individuals — to Germans.
It was in this context that so much of Europe got its welfare state. It seemed like a mandatory step to push back the chaos of a continent in ruin. Too many people were homeless and starving to do anything else.
Of course, there were plenty of refugees in the US and Canada after the war. Somehow.
At the US Holocaust Museum in DC I was shocked to see the number of visas not issued to people trying to flee the war. From 1933-1938 thousands of US visas allocated for people from Germany went unissued.
I’ve marvelled at how many POWs who spent the end of the war in Canada ended up staying.
I’ve been horrified by stories of how US and Canadian nationals were rounded up and sent to live in camps. All of their things were confiscated and sold to pay for their imprisonment. They missed out on years of education and wages and then started over again with nothing.
David Kynaston’s doorstop of a book, Family Britain: 1951-57, tells us that even in the 1950s, GPs in England’s NHS were less likely to refer elderly patients for services with long waiting lists. Offices were often in buildings that were difficult to access and navigate for people with mobility and cognitive issues. Chronic patients were given a lower budget than acute patients.
Taken together, this meant geriatric patients received a lower standard of service.
In Crow Planet, Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes about watching a family of crows support a baby crow with a disability.
Crows are known to spend years helping raise younger siblings before establishing nests of their own. Sometimes they build nests nearby and remain a regular prescence. Those who establish nests farther afield are might drop in for visits with their parents.
Reading Against the Grain, I learned that as humans domesticated animals they sought to maximize production “by culling both young males and females beyond reproductive age” so that “When archaeologists wish to know whether a large find of sheep or goat bones is from a wild or domesticated flock, the age and gender distribution of the remains provides the strongest evidence of active human management and selection.”
There have been 240 human generations since agriculture emerged. There is debate over if this is what made us civilized. There is debate over who domesticated who.
I wonder if we are moving away from devotion, becoming less crow-like, with each successive human generation.
Something like 200,000 people with disabilities were murdered by the Nazis.
Of course, eugenics was a product of the USA. Its history is intertwined in the development of modern scientific medicine and the women’s rights movement.
It would take less than a thousand years for there to be 240 generations of crows.
How many times have we been told that in the old days families took care of their own?
The tone usually implies that in these mythical old days care was never a burden. It was never too expensive for families to pay on their own. It never required too many sleepless nights or lifting someone you simply cannot lift or required 24/7 care from one person.
Sometimes there is the suggestion that in the old days there were simply few people who needed care. They say it’s only thanks to modern medicine that we struggle to provide for the many people who would have died had they lived 100 years ago.
But have no fear! Just as modern medicine has enabled people to live longer, we will solve the caregiving crisis with robots and apps.
I want to understand what it was like to perform care work less than 100 years ago and I can’t.
It’s so hard to understand what it’s like to perform care work now.
There are so many different stories. But there are commonalities, too.
Those caregiving robots sure would be handy right now, eh?
What do you know about how care work has changed in the past 100 years?
What was it like for your generation? Your parents’ generation? Your grandparents’ generation? Your great-grandparents’ generation?
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I love this reflection and I'm going to go find that book on crows! I found this book fascinating - plenty of social history of caring here as well as design history (which is fascinating) https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07CG2WXTL/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1