The world is moving forward? Each subsequent generation is happier, richer, more technically advanced than the previous one? Well, not necessarily.
Today we will do what Poles do best - to complain. And there is something to complain about, because in the past it was just worse. Below are the top ten reasons why.
It used to be worse because…
 | 10. | Polish officials made scams that even the creators of Amber Gold would not have dreamed of. For example, the construction of the post office in Gdynia cost ... more than the Paris opera house. It is better not to mention the construction of the first railway line on the Vistula River (read more about it). |
 | 9. | Green could kill. Until the end of the 19th century, most of the dyes used to produce this color contained lethal doses of arsenic (read more on that). |
 | 8. | Most people lived in conditions of dignity. Polish peasants often lived not even in huts, but in huts made of clay and brushwood covered with straw (read more on this topic). |
 | 7. | The Polish countryside was a hotbed of crime and pathology. Disputes between family and neighbors were often resolved by force, and the corpse littered densely. Nobody could be sure that his house would not be attacked by a gang of ruthless bandits (read more about it) . |
 | 6. | You could have gone to jail for insulting Hitler. It was for a few unflattering words about the leader of the Third Reich in 1935 that a Polish court sentenced a Jewish merchant to three years in prison (read more about this). |
 | 5. | The state imposed absurd taxes on literally everything. As a result, in the Second Polish Republic, lighters became a "luxury item". A kilogram of sugar cost ... even 15 zlotys today (read more about it). |
 | 4. | Drunken drivers went completely unpunished. In pre-war Poland, there were no penalties for driving a car. An estimate is that up to 75% of all accidents were the result of alcohol consumption (read more about this) . |
 | 3. | Nobody took equality seriously. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, the authors of popular handbooks could write with impunity that women are "always worse than men and that they are lower in the social hierarchy" ( read more on this topic). |
 | 2. | Gasoline in interwar Poland was terribly expensive. A liter of fuel then cost - in terms of today's currency value - over PLN 8. If we take into account the differences in earnings between 1930 and 2013, it turns out that in the Second Polish Republic, fuel was even several times more expensive than today (read more on this topic) . |
 | 1. | Prohibition was in force, not only in America . Poles also had their own experiences with prohibition (read more about it) . |