Retro Me. Please!

"The world is too much with us, late and soon", Wordsworth's poetic take on his times seems to apply  to us this day. Mass killings of the innocent,  leaders of countries drunk with power, a collapse of morality in the name of "freedom" and, well, take the world news. If you dare. I want to retro into times when it was not so. Yes, there were most of the dreadful happenings then as now, but they were not as much smeared in our faces with moving depictions and emotional comment as there is now. We could read about them and hear about them in reports but in a time frame that allowed for consideration. There was time to absorb and adjust and contemplate the meaning and how to reconcile the feelings that affected our own lives. Today there is "too much with us" and a barrage of horrors at us constantly in full colour and sound. Stop, I say. Stop. And then I realize, I am the one who has to make it stop and it's very simple. It lies right under my fingers. I can turn it off and turn on something good and beautiful and true, or go outside and look into a tree or over a stretch of grasses and flowers or just gaze the blueness or clouds in the sky. Even the feeling of rain on my face. I think of the days when kids had no plastic or television or computers. Education happened at school where the desks were in straight rows and we did what the teacher said and loved it all. Our parents didn't bother with us when we went into the yard to play climbing trees and fishing in the little streams or going down the street to talk to neighbours or into stores to buy penny candy. We laughed at the cartoons in the thick weekend newspapers that were long and had full articles that were written in fine English and we loved our leaders because that's what was done. We didn't see people in categories, they looked different than us but that's the way it was and no one argued about it. Sure, I grew up as an ordinary kid in an ordinary neighbourhood and maybe that seems privileged but I loved it and I loved all the people around me because no one told me about hate. I didn't have parents that told me how to think. They took care of us, my sister and I, and most of the time we were left to make our own plans and days. When we graduated high school we got jobs and decided on careers and had to work if we wanted to go to universities. The cost was something that could be earned. When we found our life's work, we started at the bottom and tried to get to the top. We lived at home until we could afford a place of our own. Our employers liked us and we liked them. We stayed until it was time to retire with our gold watches and cut glass bowls in hand. Along the way, we met the person we loved and would spend our lives with to become good citizen parents and grandparents. Okay, death came along, too, but it was all natural and sort of expected. It was all very simple. Then.