To be honest, this is my very first post on the junior theme, and I haven't done anything more than glance at a few pages of a book I checked out at the library. But before we embark on this exciting expedition through the nineteenth century together, I'd like to make a note on one thing.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, people automatically get the impression that the Industrial Revolution was all bad. But as I was sitting here and thinking about it myself, I realized one crucial piece of information: the transition from agriculture-based jobs to manufacturing plants and factories was made completely and absolutely voluntarily. In other words, people chose a lifestyle of tedious, factory labor on their own. Had they wanted to, they could have kept things as they were. And they didn't.
The only reason I'm putting that out there is because I feel like people tend to accept the faulty notion that people were sitting in circles singing kumbaya all day long before the 1800s, and then as soon as the evil, selfish entrepreneurs arrived, everything went bad. Well, let me tell you, no matter how you feel about what transpired during the 1800s, it simply didn't happen that way. In fact, people were very poor beforehand. Starvation was a very real threat at the time. And some would argue that the voluntary shift into the Industrial Revolution is what got us through those horrific times when people were always hungry. I'm not necessarily saying everything that occurred during that time was acceptable, but I'm just making the point that it was a voluntary transition that took people from a bad time through a journey to where we are today.
Well, those are some of my thoughts on the Industrial Revolution and the junior theme in general. Feel free to comment. What do you think?
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