How The Face of America Has Changed
The Face of America has changed. The Mass Production that occurred with the beginning of the Industrial Age also went hand in hand with the population explosion which is very evident today. More and more large families were being raised in order to have more helpers on the farms doing farm labor and this greatly increased the population. Also the fact that with two Wold Wars within a 50 years span of each other, this too increased the population as more soldiers returned home to loved ones and then there was a baby increase!! Thus the generation of retirees are known as “The Baby Boomers”. Because of their service to the United States Government, the Congress gave these soldiers a college education with grants, thus a college education for the working person. The Congress also gave them G.I. Housing and these homes for a soldier and his bride sprung up all over the country. This era had two major wars involving the entire planet and a Major Depression of the 1930′s in the United States smacked in the middle of those two horrific wars. The years were very hard on Americans. Not one family was unaffected!! After World War I, soldiers returned home to much change. The Automobile had been invented as well as Refrigeration, the Electric Light Bulb, the Telephone and the Airplane all had been invented and the Industrial Age had entered the scene. Then the Dark Days of the Deep Depression and the Stock Market Crash of the 1930′s sent things into a spiral of hopelessness and despair!! Many families were without Jobs and the country came out of those difficult years only to enter into another World War named WW II in the 1940′s. Following the end of this horrific war with the Atom Bomb being dropped on Japan, the American soldiers came home to still more changes. At the end of the war, we now were into the era of Television which had been birthed from Radio which was a visual radio and from there into the era of Technology. This led people more into isolation, sitting in front of their T.V.’s and later their computers, no longer socializing on the front porch and no longer letter writing but sending off Electronic Mails ( E-Mails) or Texting!! Now the days of the Industrial Age are being left behind as we travel into the Age of Information with Computers, Cell Phones and Social Media taking over the planet. One of the problems which we have today is a problem that each former generation also had and that is the Resistance to Change.
The Face of America Continues to Change
The Face of America continues to change from the Days of the Individual Farm to the Industrial Age of Mass Production to our Society now changing yet again this time to a more Technical Interaction of a Global Information Age. With that multiculturalism is rapidly redefining what it means to be an American. In the place of the “Proverbial Melting Pot” we have a new Paradigm with an emphasis on preserving the ethnic and cultural identity of the diverse communities within our country. About ten years ago the Washington Post published an article on how this country’s demographic shift has been so significant that within the lifetime of today’s teens, no individual ethnic group – including Caucasians of European descent will comprise a majority of the nation’s population. Currently we have a President of the United States who is a man of color. Years ago men of his color had been slaves in the south. My father in law who is 100 years old (the Patriarch of our family) says “the young people of our country need to learn two languages besides English. Those two languages need to be Spanish and Chinese, he says”!! Yes, the face of America continues to change as the wold itself is changing constantly. Every family will be affected. We all need to learn to blend our hearts and our hands and to no longer be Resistant to Change but to Embrace it and love our neighbors learning more about their heritage and customs growing our planet into a friendlier place to abide. Our planet is our home and our globe is getting smaller. The Global Information Age teaches us more about our neighbors who are our friends and no longer our enemies. We need to extend our hand of friendship and embrace our neighbors with acceptance and brotherly love.
Flags of our World within our Country
