Crappy Book

By Cheryl Bruce

Did someone or something make you feel crappy today?  Feeling like you're stuck?  Just feeling generally unhappy?  Sometimes a book appears just when you need it to help you find ways of dealing with day to day life.  Stress and worry do not have to be your friends, kick them out the door as you take back your control.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cheryl Bruce
• Release date: Apr 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386957126

Cheryl Bruce

Cheryl Bruce started writing poetry at a young girl in Montreal and even with her family moving west before she became a teenager, she never lost her love for writing.  Cheryl quickly adapted to life in Calgary, and still calls it her hometown. She has now embraced living in a small town about an hour from Calgary.  When Cheryl isn’t writing, she works as a bookkeeper and devotes her life to her husband and daughter.   Cheryl has lived a varied life and has been a volunteer fire fighter, a computer nerd, and had office jobs.  The work she enjoys most though is being a mom and writing novels.

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How Did We Get Here?

HOW DID WE GET HERE?  This is not a theological question, I’m considering society and its state here.  How did the world become so negative?  When did we start living in fear?  When did we start hating our neighbors?

Well to start with, I’m not a historian, and I haven’t done studies on anything, these are just my own conclusions, right or wrong.

Let’s start with the beginning of the 20th Century.  Horse and carriage was our means of transportation, technology was in constant development, however it was a small part of our lives.  We grew our own food and raised our own cattle.  If we wanted money, we worked, and hard.  Life was simpler and the funny thing is, it took a lot longer to do things then because there were very little short cuts.  However they always had the time to be with each other.

Technology was taking off, and the horseless carriage was going into production, when the depression hit, and a world war.  Society was shattered.  All of their ideals, dreams, plans, and hopes for their futures were suddenly out of their control.  It devastated the world.  People were starving, some lost everything, including their homes.  Helplessness took control, some committed suicide, all lost their sense of identity, their control on their lives.  Every person had to go into survival mode just to exist.  Kind of a negative time in history, I’d say.

If anyone has ever gone through any life altering experience, whether it be through a death, an illness, or just bad circumstances, you understand this feeling of helplessness.  You do whatever it takes to survive through it, and put your own identity aside to do so.  No, think of how long it took you to recover from that situation.  Sometimes, you never fully recover, you never are quite the same again.

So now, think about how long it took society to recover from the 20’s.  In the early 40’s people were just starting to have hope again.  Families had finally started rebuilding, and gaining control of their lives again, when what happened?  Another world war.  Talk about feeling like you’ll never catch up.  Again, hopelessness set in.  The really hard part of this war was that there was so much media letting them know about the gruesome details.  Newspapers and the radio were constantly negative, people were scare, some even paranoid.  If you went to the theatre to escape this unbearable existence, they showed you pictures of what was going on.

So people again lost control of their dreams, hopes, plans, and ideals.  And to top it all off, fear was in every person.  Not a very positive environment for sure.

The 50’s.  A positive time – finally, well just about.  This time when people took control, they took full control.  They got financial control of their lives, there was work to be had, and their dreams were being realized.

The other side of the 50’s?  The threat of nuclear war came around.  Again, that war word!  However, this time, people did not lose their spirit.  They just built bomb shelters.  They were now survivors and were going to do better than that.  Recovery was in full swing, and nothing was going to stop them.

Then the 60’s happened.  The 60’s started out good, but then they wanted another war.  And thanks to all that recovery, they said no way!

You see all though history, there have been protests, and resistance to the way things were.  However it wasn’t as prevalent as it was in the 60’s.  People stood strong for what they believed in.  They were ready for peace and quiet and had had enough of war.  But it happened anyway.

Unfortunately, this is when the helplessness became overwhelming.  The feeling that no matter how loud you complained, it didn’t change anything.  Talk about an empty feeling.  So people turned to drugs.  Everyone was so frustrated and depressed, that the 70’s were a decade of darkness for most.  Nuclear was still a very real fear.  And the drugs were a big part of the 70’s.  Not just pot anymore, strong drugs that altered people’s perceptions.

Financially, the world finally recovered in the 80’s.  There were jobs everywhere, computers were going to make it so we wouldn’t have to do the work anymore, and people started enjoying life again.  But still, drugs were rampant.  Some were getting very rich off drugs, and this brought about violence.  And yes, another war was going on, the cold war.

The 80’s were a very positive decade with a very negative side effect.  Someone even stated that we would have to pay a big price with our free living and spending.  Sure enough, that negative prediction came true.  Aids and near financial ruin happened.

Now the 90’s.  Yes, another war, Desert Storm.  And with that, the threat of potential ecological ruin with the fires in Kuwait.  Again, fear raged throughout society.

Society has really taken a beating over the last hundred years.  We all, every one of us, have the desire to survive, do better, and build our futures.  Yet, someone has had to go and start a was somewhere whenever we finally get strong enough to do this.

I blame first the governments for the wars, and second the media for showing it to us.

So how did we get to feel so helpless,