Put it all together

We live in a world that seems to be worse each day. If we watch the news, we can see that most of the information has to do with violence, earthquakes, droughts, fires and there is only little time devoted to good news. Probably, that’s why many people don’t want to have children anymore, they think that life was much better in the past and they are afraid because they consider that the world is now more dangerous and more inhospitable. However, many things are better now than the way they used to be a hundred years ago. Let’s take a look at some of them.

In the 1920’s, life expectancy in Mexico was below 30! Which means that people died a lot younger than they do now. Considering that current life expectancy is around 75, it is unfair to say that everything is just going worse. There are many reasons why people are alive for longer, one of them is that now we have antibiotics and that makes a big difference. Before penicillin, there was not an effective treatment for infections such as pneumonia, gonorrhea or rheumatic fever.

Before 1922, one of the worst sicknesses was diabetes, people from all ages just waited in bed until their heart stopped beating. There was no treatment and it was quite dramatic to see rooms with 50 or more patients in a coma, there was nothing doctors could do. Because of Insulin, diabetic people can now have an almost normal life and their deaths are not imminent anymore.

In the 1920’s, Mexican population was more illiterate than it is now. In those times, only 20% of Mexicans could read and write, probably because it wasn’t compulsory to have basic studies, it was after the Mexican revolution that children started to attend school. Now, the percentage of literate people reaches more than 95% which means that our educational system is better, but on the other hand, only 8% of Mexicans have post graduate studies, which is still a very low number.

Being a woman is difficult because they live in an unfair world. There are many situations in which they suffer from discrimination, for example, when they make less money than men when performing the same job. To make things worse, they are afraid all the time because in a country like Mexico women risk their lives everyday and they can’t even wear whatever they want because they frequently suffer from harassment. However, women’s lives were even more unfair in the past, as they weren’t allowed to vote before 1953.

Of course not everything is perfect, and there is still a huge amount of injustice. Women, people with disabilities, LGBT community, children and indigenous people still have a long way to go before they can finally live in a fairer society, but even those people have gained rights and they are a little better now than before.