We recently toured a mine in Virginia City, Nevada--a place I've wanted to visit since watching "Bonanza" episodes as a kid. Every Sunday night my parents visited the Fletchers, who had a TV (we did not), and I got to watch "Candid Camera," "Disneyworld," and "Bonanza."
But I digress. The mining site reminded me of how incredibly difficult it was for most people to make a living even in relatively prosperous places in the nineteenth century. The miners often worked far underground and in very hot and dangerous conditions. Much of the work consisted of pounding away with a sledehammer at the end of a long drill for many hours a day. Most people across the world still have to work very hard to make relatively little.
In this regard, as in so many others, middle-class Americans are truly exceptional. We have much more comfortable lives and don't have to work all that hard (compared to people of other times and places) to get them. But this arrangement strikes us as so natural, so ordinary, that we seldom reflect on how peculiar and lucky we are.
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