Maybe it’s just because I’m growing old. Maybe it’s because the people I talk to most of the time are growing old as well. Maybe it’s the tumultuous times we live in. Whatever the reason, I find that the conversations I get involved with tend to center on how much simpler life used to be. I talk with others and we remember the uncomplicated ways in which we lived, grew up, had fun, and learned about life. I find myself wishing my kids had known that world, and I do my best to share it. No, it wasn’t all sunshine and lollypops.
We grew up in a strange time. Our parents were the product of the fifties and sixties. Though Howdy Doody was long before my time, he was still around in reruns, as were the Mouseketeers. I watched Shirley Temple movies, and the Three Stooges which were all more a part of my mom’s generation. Woody Woodpecker and Popeye cartoons started off most movies at the theater. PPPP Porky Pig always told us when we had hit the end with “TTThat’s All, Folks!” We had Mr. Ed, Gilligan, Gomer (Shazam!), and Coyote and Roadrunner (beep-beep). We still lived in the age of the Western so we watched Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Big Valley, and Have Gun Will Travel. At our grandparents’ homes we were exposed to the weekly dose of country and hillbilly which came the Hee Haw! Yet, we also had cutting edge shows like Salvage 1, The Six Million Dollar Man, Mannix, Kojak (Who loves ya, Baby?) and some of the best James Bond movies.
Soap Opera’s were still soap operas. They actually had soap commercials between the segments, and some people lived by them, thought the characters were real, and stopped their lives to see what happened to Erica or when they heard, “Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives.” Their titles were shortened in conversations – Days, GH, AMC.
We listened to music from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. Then we were exposed to the music of the nineties when our kids came along- BSB, NSYNC, and Britney Spears. Our music started out on forty-fives and vinyl albums, went to cassettes, and eight-track. We thought we were high tech when we went to CDs. Who would have ever thought we’d go to nothing — absolutely nothing but an electronic capture?
We lived in an era where cafes or diners were just part of a small town community. Some of the best greasy hamburgers and fries that could ever be found disappeared when they went away. Those places were run by short-order cooks that could run the gambit of eggs, bacon, and flapjacks on the flattop while whipping up a chef salad that included the complete food pyramid, dropping a basket of fries in the deep fryer, and breading a chicken fried steak the size of a dinner plate. And don’t kid yourself, those cooks ran the show because without them the whole thing ground to a halt.
Riding bikes all day long, all over town, to someone’s house out in the country, to the cemetery, and even to the next town was a normal part of growing up. We made a living off collecting pop bottles and getting the deposits (real recycling) while we free ranged all over town. Mischief was just that mischief – not destruction, violence, spray painting or lack of respect for personal property.
The Kennedy assassination occurred in my birth year. We lived through Vietnam, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and eight other presidents. I remember the day Elvis died. We watched as NASA sent up rockets to the moon and they put up Skylab. Then when the Space Shuttle came out, we were all amazed at its sophistication. We saw both Challenger and Columbia blow up. And then we were out of the space business. When we returned to space, NASA and SpaceX went back to rockets (I was hoping for something more along the lines of and X-Wing Fighter).
This crossing of eras, decades, and even centuries that my generation has done, it leaves us wondering where we’re headed and what we’ve left behind. No, those years behind us, they weren’t all wonderful, but I do think they were simpler, less complicated, and more real than the times we are living through today.
Today’s generation faces tremendous challenges. They even face the erasure of their own existence. Of course, some people consider this a good thing. The Save the Earth crowd, will see it as just another way to leave no trace of mankind and his damage to the earth in our wake (another subject for conversation). Yet, when their lives have passed, there will be little physical evidence that they lived. With digital photos, smartphones, and the computer age, their entire childhoods are at risk for elimination. When looking for genealogical records, they will find huge holes in the pictorial images which continue the timelines of their families. With the creation of whats being called Deep Fakes, the ability to manipulate images, video, and voice recordings, their entire reality could be reshaped. The ability to determine what is real, what is truth, what is valuable is being distorted day by day.
As we design things, programs, systems, and processes to make our lives easier, are we inadvertently making our lives more difficult? Shit, look at all the passwords you have to memorize and tell me this ain’t so. This rapid information delivery we have today, also delivers rapid misinformation. Social media has given everyone a platform, removed respect for our neighbors, and made it easier for the SM corporations to control what we hear or learn. If they don’t like it, they shut it down. If it fits their agenda, they feed it to us by the scoopful. We have the luxury of near endless access to information, and the burden which comes with it.
The future we imagined while watching Bond, Star Trek, and other futuristic movies may not be all we’d hoped. In fact, maybe Back To The Future II gave us a more accurate view of what we could expect. Perhaps we will come to regret the advancement of society, unless we learn to manage it properly. Not everything we can imagine is good for a society.
