It's astonishing how good things are for the average citizen of a developed country. We have food, transport, medical care, entertainment, information, and physical comfort beyond anything the kings and queens of the past ever experienced.
A car, even a cheap car, is an amazing thing. We move at 75 MPH, in comfort in most any weather, day or night, with the radio playing whatever we like.
A car probably isn't the most noteworthy luxury. Reliable food, the whole y ear round, trumps that. Until recently most adults had "starvation lines" o n their teeth, from winters when they hadn't had enough food.
The only friend of mine who had that got it from a winter in a refugee camp in Wales, en route from Czechoslovakia - which he walked out of, with his parents in 1948 when he was eight - to Australia, where he got his Ph.D. in Chemistry in the same lab that I did. Interesting guy - now dead of stomac h cancer, to everybody's considerable surprise, since his risk-taking natur e had made it seem unlikely that he'd die in his own bed.
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