At times I wish the pace of this old world was a little bit slower. I suppose that is a sign that I need a vacation away from everything, the TV and Internet included.
You may hear older folks or even those people who are not so old wish for “simpler times.” I suppose when I was a kid, in the early to mid 1960s things were quite a bit simpler than today, but they weren’t all that much simpler or even “the good old days” for many. I think I first heard of Vietnam when I was 7 or 8 years old. Not too much later, that piece of ground in Southeast Asia would come to an omnipresence in our society until at least the time I had enlisted in the military. Growing up with a draft, with a war killing tens of thousands of young people, some of whom you knew, was not at all the good old days and weren’t particularly simple.
Then, pretty much all of my life I have known about “the bomb” although it seemed for the most a real and looming threat for the first 30 or so years of my life.
Yet, times were in some respects simpler when I was a kid. I can remember watching water rushing through a culvert after a heavy rain and staying entertained for a good half hour watching the sandy brown liquid runoff run all which a ways.
We didn’t have a phone in our house until we moved into our grandmother’s place, after she died. The phone, one of those rotary dial versions, was also on a party line with the older lady who lived in our then-deceased Uncle Algie and Aunt Ada’s house across the field. Unless there was an emergency Mrs. Irons wasn’t about to get off the phone until she had finished telling someone how she made her fig preserves. We had TV of course. It came in only two colors in our house, black and white. It seems there was always some kind of record player around and a radio. I was kind of techno nut even back then. I guess if I hadn’t been so lazy I might have built a ham radio. But I remember when I was about 10, my parents bought me a fairly nice, though not terribly expensive radio with AM/FM and two shortwave bands.
For as long as I had the radio, up to my early high school days, you couldn’t hear much on FM because there weren’t very many FM stations in our area. But I learned a good bit that prepared me for this vastly more complicated world today by listening to shortwave stations, including those from Communist lands such as Radio Havana.
There was a time when I was going to college that I didn’t pay much attention to TV, I didn’t even have one where I lived. The only time I’d watch was when I was on duty at the firehouse. I’d listen to the local radio stations where several of my close friends were deejays. Of course, I listened to music. A good many friends had very high-powered sound systems. We used to scare the cows away when I lived in the country and one of my friends would bring his monster Klipsch speakers over for a party.
From the time when my friend Bruce showed my how to write with his computer in 1989 until present time it seems I have learned a little more technology each day and have seen the techno world explode into one new thing and another. Along with cell phones that record videos and take pictures and allow Internet access to the cable TV networks that provide the so-called “24-hour news cycle,” the complex world has become even more complex. The world is real-time 24/7.
The president of the U.S. watched live from the White House on Sunday as a U.S. Navy SEAL commando team raided and killed the man who is responsible for a number of terrorist acts including ones on Sept. 11, 2001, in which two loaded passenger planes were crashed as missiles into the World Trade Center in New York, another jet was crashed into the Pentagon and a third went down in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought terrorists for control of the plane, killing all passengers and terrorists. More than 3,000 Americans were killed that day.
Less than 24 hours later, a DNA test confirmed that one of those killed in the SEAL team raid which happened in Pakistan was indeed Osama bin Laden. Although most of the raid was videotaped, the president decided not to show the world the death pictures of bin Laden, fearing the photos would inflame passions of would be terrorists. Shortly afterward, a whole big deal erupted by both friend and foe of President Obama (no relation to Osama, Mamma) over whether the pictures of the dead terrorists should be shown. Now much of the world is complaining about the pictures not being shown.
Now, again in real time, we once more we are dropped down into the vastly complicated world and since I am back to where I started, perhaps the self-analysis helped me some, but I still need some time off and a chance to disconnect from most of the world’s literal USBs. Perhaps I can go somewhere with the only sounds existing come from wind gently blowing through the treetops, water lapping through rocks on a river or large creek, or perhaps be startled by the hoot of an owl nearby or be amused by the dueling calls of whippoorwills. Time to cut off the phone and the Internet and the 24/7 cable.
Of course, I’ll take my digital cameras. ‘Cause you still need pictures or even a video of it so it can be a reminder that there are such places to getaway on a day just like this one in which that ever circling drama known as life threatens your sanity.
