Profiles in ESL Teaching: Aunt Peg, the TEFL MILF

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Perspective

Seems like pretty much everyone I know is despairing about the state of the world and the future now.



Perhaps it's just the company I keep, but the internet would tend to support this general sense of doom and gloom.

But one does need to keep things in perspective.

I'm 48 and a half; the global events in and around my life haven't been entirely pleasant , including standouts such as the Vietnam and Afghan wars, September 11, the Ethiopian famine, and so forth.



But let's take a look at the first 50 years of the 20th century.

Let's see, we had:

• World War I (a war of unprecedented destruction which also completely re-drew Europe)
• The 1918 flu pandemic that killed 3-5 percent of the global population
• The terrifying environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl
• The Great Depression
• Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust
• The rise of Stalin with his Purges and engineered famines that also killed millions. 

During that period we had presidents such as Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, who with the Teapot Dome Scandal, are generally considered among the worst.



So, THOSE were some rough years. The nearly half-century of my life has been a comparative cakewalk, and of course that worst thing that has happened to me personally is like, losing my sunglasses in the Galopogas Islands or something.