Sometimes we get so enveloped in the problems of today that we don’t see how fortunate we are to live in 2025.
    Recently, so much attention has been devoted to the rising grocery and rent prices that we fail to see how fortunate we are by comparison to people who lived in earlier eras in Canada, let alone people who still starve in other parts of the world.
    I can’t forget my own childhood here in rural Ontario. My parents bought their farm when my father returned from serving in the army in World War II and installed hydro and a deep well system. But we had no indoor toilet, and didn’t for as long as we lived on the farm until 1964. My best friend Ross had an indoor toilet, thanks to a generous family gift, but they had a shallow well and no furnace (we didn’t either).
    Recently I reread The Grapes of Wrath, by Nobel Literature Prize-winning author John Steinbeck about the thousands of share-cropping farmers in western U.S. states who journeyed to California seeking a new life during the drought years of the 1930s.
    I chuckled when the Joad family was fortunate to get into a government camp at one point and the children went to the bathroom and were panicked when they flushed the toilet and water spouted out – they thought they’d broken something. In another case, a woman was washing her clothes in the toilet and complained that the toilet was so small that she could only put one pair of pants in at a time, unaware that just around the corner there were sinks with more room.
    The “Okies” didn’t have the ringer-washers my mother used in the 1950s. “Wash day” would be a day-long   procedure, washing the clothes, rinsing them out in fresh water, then running them through the ringer and hanging them on the clothes line to dry. (This time of the year, I remember clothes freezing and having to be brought into the house and thawed out again. Similar scenes are still played out when you drive through Mennonite country today.)
    Today we stick the clothes in the automatic washer and go off to do other things, then pop them into the automatic dryer to finish them off. Wash day takes little time.
    Most of the time the world of the past is forgotten, but now and then it is recalled. I still remember the 1962 National Film Board feature The Drylanders about a family trying to survive the drought of the 1930s on the Canadian Prairies. And then there’s Angela’s Ashes, the 1999 Frank McCourt Pulitzer-Prize-winning book recalling his years growing up in poverty in Northern Ireland. Even in the city they had no indoor toilet.
    There are still people in every city trying to survive in tents this winter but for most of us, our gripes seem petty in the perspective of what people survived in the past.
    What struck me in The Grapes of Wrath was the way Californians treated Oklahomans and Kansans and other people driven from their land as if they were an invading army, and they must have seemed foreign to the settled people whose jobs were suddenly endangered by hundreds of thousands of newcomers willing to take anything so they could feed their families. 
    There’s also a sense of threat Americans feel these days from the thousands of people who flood across the border from Mexico and other countries. Some employers ignore minimum wage laws to hire these workers to work for less.
    But on the other hand, we just came through the Christmas period and dozens of agencies reached out to help those less fortunate. There was a rush of gifts to food banks and the Scott Mission in Toronto cooked and served 70 turkeys to those needing a meal.
    We are so fortunate to live in Canada today compared to other places or other times in the past.◊