Blekinge Museum: A museum... of my times gone by

About a month ago I had the chance to visit a wonderful small regional museum in Sweden, the Blekinge Museum. It lies very close to my recently deceased mother’s family house, in which I spent a lot of time in my youth. It was a shocking and a humbling experience. It was not a museum of very old times gone by; it was a museum of so much of, since 1950, my times gone by.

Images of heavy horses pulling carriages full of hay, Olivetti accounting machines, telephone exchanges with hundreds of cables, old bicycles, wrinkled by rough seas rowing boats, and hundred similar items that I have lived with, but that mostly no longer exists, and are much less used, shouted out… “Per, what on earth do you know about tomorrow… what does anyone know?”

Coming out of the museum, more than ever, I felt like praying “God make us daring”; or at least God make my children, grandchildren and their descendants daring, so that they are not among the so many to be left behind… doomed (by automation and robots) to end up like the heavy horses of my time. God let them live free, and faraway from the high priests of complacency.

And as for me, as an economist, as a citizen, as a parent and grandparent, if I only look back, and do not do our utmost to imagine what lies around the corners of tomorrow then, like old soldiers (and heavy horses) I might perhaps just better fade away.

Does all what we older have lived not mean anything for the young? Of course, it should signify a lot… but much more in terms of wisdom, than in terms of knowledge.

The sad fact that my mother had passed away just weeks earlier, on February 10, clearly made me reflect on our intergenerational responsibilities.

@PerKurowski