Progress and the Wisdom of Pa

The Long Winter tells the amazing story of a prairie town's survival during a seven-month long winter of blizzards. Slowly, the isolated town on the treeless prairie begins to run out of food and fuel. It takes all the creativity that the pioneers possess just to keep alive.

Ma got up and put another stick of hay on the fire. When she lifted the stove lid, a reddish-yellow smoky light flared up and drove back the dark for a moment. Then the dark came back again. The wild screaming of the storm seemed louder and nearer in the dark.

"If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light," Ma considered. "We didn't lack for light when I was a girl, before this newfangled kerosene was ever hear of."

"That's so," said Pa. "These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves--they're good things to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em."

I wonder what Pa would say about our society today?

Taken from:
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. The Long Winter (1940), p. 192.