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II. Culture, Community, & Me
BS ‘n’ About…
Grandma’s World
Our Great Grandparents, God bless their souls, would probably feel more at home in Ancient Rome than in our spare bedroom. In one lifetime, human society and the nature of human interaction has changed more than in all previous recorded human history. Scarily, we don’t even seem to notice.
Like the Romans, Grandma’s was a world of wood, leather, and steel. …extended families in tight-knit communities. …home cooking and back porches. Relationships were for life. Jobs were, too. Granddaddy did what his daddy did. Grandma died within walking distance of where she was born after a lifetime filled with family, friends, and co-workers. People filled her every waking hour.
In one lifetime we’ve gone all plastic and digital, spending a lot more time with our TVs, cars, computers, cellphones, Blackberrys, and iPods than with actual flesh-and-blood human beings. We live harried, transient existences in scattered, alternative families. Our jobs are temporary. Relationships, too. We babble on the cellphone all the way to work where we stare at a screen all day so we can iPod it home to live the pot pie-hi-def lifestyle until bedtime. We’ve become slaves to the very technologies we created to free us.
Grandma didn’t worry about injustices in Indonesia, tidal waves in Timbuktu, or serial killers in Seattle. She didn’t fret over Nicole’s new relationship or whether some Wall Street crook was going to ‘get away with it’. She had more important things to worry about: Real things. Real people. Life.
Grandma didn’t spend half her day in front of a TV and the other half at a keyboard. Grandma didn’t let daycare and Nickelodeon raise her kids. Grandma didn’t fill her freezer with microwave meals. She had better things to do: Like raising a family and being a good wife, mom, & neighbor.
From the dawn of time we have sculpted our lives within an extended family/close-knit community frame of reference. It was an easy-paced, earth-toned existence set to conversational levels. In one lifetime this has been replaced with an individual/nation state frame of reference, a media-driven, technicolor assault on the senses set to deafening, mind-numbing volumes. Never before has it been this way. Humanity has changed more in one lifetime than in all previous recorded history.
As recently as a Baby Boomer’s childhood, our families, neighborhoods, and communities provided the physical horizons of our world. Very few of us ever ventured beyond them. We always returned to them. It was that physical world which shaped our character, ambitions, desires, and interactions.
Human beings were never meant to spend this much time alone, locked up inside our own heads. Mankind’s rise to pre-eminence on this planet can be traced to his learning to work together, be it to hunt down a wooly mammoth or build an Empire State Building. From the dawn of time through Grandma’s day, we were communal beings. We no longer are. We are lions being turned into tigers, changing the very essence of what it means to be human. …changing the very nature of life itself.
The scariest aspect of what amounts to the greatest evolutionary leap we’ve ever made is that it doesn’t seem anyone has even noticed. It isn’t part of any plan. It hasn’t been thought through. It seems natural to us that our kids stay locked up in their rooms plugged into something, usually at ear-splitting volumes, too afraid to go outside. It seems natural to us that our jobs require less and less human contact. It seems natural to eat alone and date by computer. It seems natural to send the kids off to daycare and the parents off to Florida.
It’s not natural.
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