Quote of the Week...from Mark Twain

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.               ---Mark Twain

There is a temptation among some of us to take an ages-old quote and apply it, out of the temporal contest in which it was made, to today's world...the above statement by renowned and beloved American writer Mark Twain (Samuel Clemons) is a case in point.  Twain was said to have made it in jest after a reader with an unusual name asked him to change that of one of his same-named characters. Yet this quote has a much broader meaning as well, a reflection on the times he was living through...but he died in 1910, well over a century ago.  And I think a lot has happened between his time and ours...

Scientific, technological and social progress means that today's possibilities are greater than before...but from the vantagepoint of the future looking back, that same time we're now experiencing will seem limited by contrast.  Serious, debilitating and fatal diseases were running rampant in Twain's time with no immunization or antibiotics available while the era's medical practices, with modern sterilization procedures just beginning to be practiced and a limited ability to control infection after operations, seem barbaric in hindsight...think of all those Civil War amputations.  Communication and transportation were much more limited, and even with the spotlight placed nowadays on racial, ethnic and gender discrepancies in our society, they were much more magnified back then.  People were stratified in their social classes and forced racial segregation was an openly accepted norm of society...even endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court...as voting rights, employment, lending, housing, medical treatment, education and the halls of justice clearly meant entirely different things to people based on their class, race, religion, ethnicity, gender...and of course how much money they had: we're still obviously working on some of this today, but it was much more pronounced back then. Yet Twain could see that his own time...which spanned the latter half of the nineteenth century and the start of the next...represented a marked difference from what it was like before.  And why not? the vast nation was now connected by rail and innovations like the telephone, incandescent light and the electrical grid were radically transforming how people lived, and then here comes the internal combustion engine and cars... 

Everybody thinks the times they are living in are at the pivotal point in history, and to an extent they're right.  The "now" of Mark Twain's time may seem different than the "now" of ours, but everything that ever happens...or ever did happen...depends on the infinitude of "nows" that preceded it.  Maybe that sounds a little simplistic, but wait a decade or two and then see what that "now" brings...