Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Time Traveling Blog

I can time travel! At least my blog posts can, thanks to being able to back date posts.  :)

It took me awhile to figure out what to post this month. I've been a bit preoccupied with a bazillion different life interruptions, including the banking issues in Cypress and the gun control talks in DC. Both of those events have affected my writing though.

One of my characters is a former UK spy for the US during World War II. In my "version" of WWII, he became one of Hitler's inner circle and is still on a quest to kill off Hitler, who's still alive and protected in the USA. I've been doing a lot of research for this series and can see us repeating some mistakes from the past, especially when it comes to our current financial situations - both global and domestic. Humans are fickle creatures, we want we want and when we want. Patience is not something we seem to be good at (myself included) and credit cards make it too easy to feed our desires.

The most interesting part of my research is comparing the media from back then to the media now, and to be able to see where the extremes are drawing their comparisons (or denial of any comparisons) of current governments to the former Nazi movement. Extreme views in either direction existed then as they do now and it's interesting to see how little they've changed over the decades, the bigger difference is in the language used then. Lucky for me, I actually have some original papers from back then.

It is no surprise to me to hear that some journalist from today called someone else an "idiot", "moron" or something even more foul, or to hear them berate guests during their shows in today's media. Not that it didn't happen back then, but the language used was far more clever, and more polite than in today's media.  I really miss the creative use of language to show their disapproval or disdain for another's work.

I'm enjoying my time travels back to that bleak time in human history as it makes me thankful for what we have now. Things may be rough today, but we still have it so much better than the world did back then. Things may be expensive, but food is plentiful, new methods of communication pop up everyday (social media anyone?), our water supply is relatively safe, and we're not having to ration energy. Better yet, more of the world is tapped into each other, providing us an opportunity to - hopefully - prevent such atrocities from happening again.