As Weyburn gears up to celebrate 100 years, I can't help but think about how different life must have been back in those early days, when our population was only about 2,500.
The Soo Line Historical Museum, Heritage Village and the Tommy Douglas Centre can teach us plenty about the local past. However, no museum beats the stories told by an oldest living relative.
Life, from the external point of view, was quite different 100 years ago.
Back then, many people made their living in agriculture and nearly everybody had a garden. Now, most people make their living in industries that had not been invented yet in 1913.
Imagine what the world was like with only 1.8 billion people living on it. Now, with nearly 7 billion, we have radically changed the face of our planet. We 'Earthlings' now have 17,000 endangered species due to humans causing habitat loss through deforestation and poaching.
Things were used differently back then as well. Plastic hadn't been invented yet, so glass was reused again and again (just like at my house!) as were paper bags from groceries, diapers, etc.
In 1913, Henry Ford created the first automated assembly line for mass-producing automobiles. Only 1.1 million vehicles were registered worldwide that year, compared to 1 billion this year.
The first commercial flight didn't happen until 1914. Now, airplane travel has changed our air forever - each international commercial flight uses 30,000 gallons of fuel. There were approximately 815.3 million scheduled passengers in the sky in 2012 alone.
Things look different from the outside, but many things have changed within the homes. Electric machines have radically changed how we prepare food, wash clothes, clean the furniture and floors, and how we entertain ourselves.
Although the first full-length feature film began shooting late in 1913, live theatre was a far more common pastime than it is now (however, some of us still act in and attend plays). Back then, they had telephones and radios, but only one per household (if you were fortunate enough to have one!). Now, with a television in every room of most homes, entertainment has become radically subjective. With internet in nearly every pocket, it seems that human interaction is often only done face-to-face if it can't be done via texting.
Let's put this into perspective: there are six billion mobile phones currently in use worldwide, while almost one billion people do not even have access to clean drinking water. This seems odd to me, since one in five children worldwide die of water-related diseases, and the electro-magnetic pollution caused by screen time has a number of negative impacts on health. Maybe more people really should start caring more about life than they do about objects, before it's too late.
Now, more than ever before, we have the ability to look forward further, to set longer-term goals and to nurture our descendents. Life expectancy one hundred years ago was 47 years. I believe this was because, by then, people had long forgotten that real, raw food is the most powerful medicine. Pharmaceutical companies were already propagating a fallacious model of health. Perhaps it will take a few more generations of disease and suffering before it is common knowledge that chemicals are simply not safe for global or human ecology.
In another hundred years, or 100,000, I sincerely doubt that there will ever be a machine invented that can top our gracious, nurturing and bountiful Mother Nature.
Deep down, is life much different than it was 100 years ago? Isn't what mattered to us then what still matters to us now? Can we imagine anything that truly matters now, not mattering in 100 years?
As we count our blessings, knowing that what matters does not change, we must also consider that in 1913, humanity was on the verge of its first world war. Now, China is being compared to Germany and the U.S. to Britain. But nobody seems to care, because we're too busy on our cell phones.
As Mark Twain put it, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
Let's hope singing together, with family and friends, is one thing that never goes out of style.
