Welcome to 2020! One hundred years ago, it was 1920, the start of a decade of American history known as “The Roaring Twenties”. Were we able to, as my mother once said, be a genie for a day and turn back time one hundred years. How strange it would seem.

I would not go to sleep wearing my CPAP machine, watching one of four televisions in my house as I went to sleep. I would not awake to that same television in the morning and place my CPAP into a machine that would clean it for me at a preset time during the day while I was at work.

I would not get up in a house heated with electricity and stumble into an inside bathroom to “conduct a little business” as I started my day. Imagine water running through pipes without a spring or well close by! I would not step on electronic scales to weigh myself just before going to check my sugar level as a guard against diabetes. My coffee would not be made in a Keurig® coffee maker. I would not sit on a comfortable love seat in front of a warm electric space heater to watch another of four televisions as I drank my coffee and ate the store bought snack that serves as breakfast.

In 1920, I would not then have gone back to my indoor bathroom to take a shower and shave before I went to put on my store bought clothes to prepare for work. I would not drive a car that can be started from inside my house so it will preheat before I have to enter it. I would not be listening to any of various choices of radio stations as I drive the five miles to work in less than ten minutes.

While at work, I would not have a computer that utilizes word processing and Internet connections that connect me with practically anyone in the world. My forefathers and –mothers would never have understood how a mouse could be used to operate such a machine that would allow me to communicate by email with friends and business associates. Purchasing items electronically or ordering food from a store and having it delivered to my house without having to physically go pick it up—unfathomable! And I certainly would not have the advantage of a cell phone. I’m sure that my ancestors who lived in 1920 would have thought I was in jail in serious trouble if I had need of a cell phone.

I wouldn’t have had the choice of storing my lunch made of primarily processed food in a refrigerator, no more than I would have the opportunity to heat it in a microwave in probably less than three minutes. I wouldn’t have been able to choose from at least a dozen restaurants and “fast food” locations to purchase lunch in rural Maynardville, located in the heart of Union County, Tennessee. Even if I would have had the opportunity to go out and buy lunch, it would have been with actual cash, not a credit card.

At the end of the day, I might have been able to read a book, but not with the aid of electric lights, and certainly not while warming my feet in front of a propane stove that had flames that look exactly like the fireplaces in use one hundred years ago. Imagine, logs that eternally lay in a fireplace but never burn up! Only Moses in the past had the luxury of such a “burning bush”.

And the list of what would not have been possible one hundred years ago today could go on endlessly. Imagine high society women going to church in blue jeans with holes in them, and paying more for jeans without holes (and unholy jeans being hard to find)? And let’s not even discuss “patches” on clothes!

While I happened to be in a doctor’s waiting room last week, I read a few articles in a magazine that brought to mind at least two other things that my 1920 counterparts would not have understood in today’s context. One of the articles talked about “whistle blowers”. Even in my youth, if someone had asked me to define a whistle blower I would probably have said, “That’s Miss Murr, our PE teacher.” During my childhood, Miss Hazel Walters Butcher had another name for a “whistle blower”—TATTLE TALE! And the term was not honorable. I can still hear kids from my childhood chanting:

Tattletale! Tattletale!
Go stick your nose up your daddy’s tail.

I am always amused by one of my colleagues who remembers being in Ms. Edna Loy’s first grade, next door to Ms. Hazel. She remembers vividly the day that Miss Hazel pinned a squirrel’s tail to a boy who had tattled and paraded him through Ms. Edna’s room as a humiliating example of what happened to tattlers. That at least is one plague I managed to escape myself when I was one of Miss Hazel’s students.

Now people can “tattle” or “blow whistles” electronically via Facebook, Twitter and other social media in very public and sometimes embarrassing ways, claiming the Constitutional protection of free speech. Not only is it possible to do this, it is often rewarded in various ways which time and space will not suffice for discussion at present. Even if I could have spoken the words, I would never have told Miss Hazel that she was obstructing the right to free speech!

The “information age” is at its height in 2020. What would our forebears in 1920 have thought if we told them we were going to conduct a “Google” search? What’s a “google”, they would probably have said? How will you know when you find one? Do you need a gun to shoot it, or is it a friendly “critter”?

And another thing that is different for us in 2020 than it was in 1920 are the “name takers”. That is a term in government and organizations that might rival what used to be commonly known as a “black list”. In my elementary years, “name taker” was often another name for a “teacher’s pet”, the one who was assigned to take names of unruly students while the teacher was out of the classroom.

Having on a few occasions been assigned to “take names” for the teacher, let me assure you it was not necessarily a joyful task. (With shame I admit that in desperation I plagued some of my former students with this hideous ordeal.) I remember Ms. Marie Lynch once giving me this dubious honor. I never felt in the least that this was because she though me a “pet” (unless perhaps a mistreated dog).

The class went nuts! I had this monstrous list of names, and some of my “friends” (or perhaps, “fiends”) begged me to tear it up and give them one more chance. I agreed, but things were no better the second time around, and I once again amassed a long list of transgressors. All of a sudden there was instant silence, and there in the classroom door stood Ms. Bobbie Marie McPhetridge Lynch herself, in all her intimidating glory! She pointed straight at me and said in a most menacing tone, “Where is your list of names?” I believe I would have died had I not had a list, and later I wish I had when she lined every student with their name on that list in front of the blackboard and gave them a most horrible tongue lashing! It was several days before I had hardly a friend who would speak to me. It is indeed lonely at the top.

Unfortunately, the decade of the “Roaring Twenties” crashed with a bang at almost its very end into the Great Depression that started when the Stock Market fell drastically in October, 1929. It was so traumatic for many in the great cities of our nation that loss of great privilege and wealth resulted in disgrace, suicide and other horrors. My mother to her dying day collected bread ties and aluminum against hard times. It was said of those native to the rural Appalachians that they were so poor, no one knew anything fell or that times were any the worse for it.

For you, Dear Reader, I fervently wish a most blessed 2020 that ushers in your best decade of life. I doubt any of us will be here one hundred years from now to tell another generation in 2120 how primitive things were in 2020.

As we enter another decade, I leave you with yet another thought from my world of email:

100 years ago everyone owned a horse and only the rich had cars.
Today everyone has cars and only the rich own horses.