It must be reunion season. Having heard from several friends over the past couple weeks who are courageously heading to theirs, I’ve wished them godspeed and safe egos.
Reunion are not my thing. They are like root canals, buying tires, or having to rent a tuxedo. None are listed on the first 28 pages of my favorite activities.
I have never cared for reunions — I prefer remembering things the way they were, not the way they are — but these recently repeated reminders of “the good old days” caused me to stop and think.
“Are they? Are those days — the good old days — really better than the way things are today?” Was singer/songwriter Carly Simon correct when she penned and released her 1971 monster hit song “Anticipation” and famously sang the line that became a Boomer generation anthem, “These are the good old days!”
The trouble with questions like this is that they make me think about the answer. After pondering the pluses and minuses of time marching on for quite awhile I eventually concluded that some things are actually better now than they used to be.
But some aren’t.
I was born in the fifties, a quiet time in the post-World War II exhalation into a white picket fence lifestyle, and grew up in the Flower Power decade of the sixties. Little is the same now as then but that’s okay.
I drew up a list of “Progress” versus “Regress” and studied my list — and declared the two a draw. The final score is 6-6. Feel free to let me know what you think.
Progress
- Improved race relations. We’ve still got a long way to go but we’ve come a long way. Gen Y and the Millenniums will advance the standard further forward, as will their children. And theirs after that. Progress cannot travel far enough, fast enough, to suit me.
- More gay tolerance. You could toss a coin in 1960s America to determine what was worse, being black or being gay. Both were scurrilous condemnations by ignorant bigots. Again we have since moved forward. And again we have further to go.
- Better global awareness. The world was enormous back then, and no country knew anything about life outside its own borders. There were national issues but no global ones, because countries never talked to each other. Africa was a prehistoric mystery, Russia was a marching army of winter coats, and China and India were mystery cultures with odd, silly traditions. For all the evil the Internet has enabled, one of its greatest benefits has been the creation of a global society. The Internet will help the world continue to shrink.
- Portable wireless phones. Land lines and busy signals were the curse of the social class. Now we can be in touch virtually anywhere, which is usually good. Not good if you’re trying to hide but overall a big step forward toward a freely mobile lifestyle.
- Smarter young people. Young people aren’t just smarter compared at a comparable age to their parents — they also know how to use tools to stay smarter, and smart is good. Since we keep making more complex problems, heaven help us if we don’t have a generation of global intelligence bright enough to pool its resources to help solve shared challenges.
- Reliable, affordable transport. Cars are affordable, better built, and last a lot longer than they used to. Same with motorcycles and bicycles. Air transportation changed from a luxury to commodity service. Smarts comes from learning, learning comes from experience, and experience based on travel and experience wises up a person quickly.
Regress
- Proliferation of guns. The average age of hunters in America is well over 40, with males outnumbering females more than 9-to-1. Most (80+ percent of hunters) use rifles to hunt deer, the most popularly sought-after game animal. Ten million Americans hunt deer, which means we need at least ten million guns. We have a lot more.
Deer or no deer the United States is by far the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. We own an estimated 270 million guns — 89 firearms for every 100 residents — easily outdistancing second place Yemen (55 firearms per 100 people) and Switzerland (third with 46 per 100). Among our stockpiled national arsenal are a pool of 3.1 million machine guns, shotguns and rifles with barrels shorter than 18 inches, and silencers — plus 2+ million “destructive devices” such as grenades.
It takes a good hunter one shot to drop a buck or doe. Any thug can shoot a human. We seem hell-bent each day on proving it. Guns are a huge social regression, far bigger than the tidal wave of illegal immigration. Society needs rules. Guns do not enforce them. - Digital dependence. The next great national freak-out will come when the Internet is taken over or crashes due to global terrorism. People won’t know what to do and businesses won’t be able to operate. These days folks can’t seem to add a column of numbers longhand or write without spellcheck (or with it for that matter). Digital addiction is a growing problem that will expand exponentially, and technology will continue to intrude upon the both the quality and privacy of our lives. Despite its omnipresent convenience, digital dependence comes with a dark and gloomy downside.
- Easy money. Money came too easy for too many for too long, nearly obsoleting the approach of accumulating wealth over time by fiscal responsibility and prudent, ethical decision-making. Patient conservatism was the de facto standard for the white-collar middle class — but now has been reduced to an admirable anomaly. People want shortcuts to money the easy way and have placed having it above earning it. Not good.
- Acceptance of situational ethics and cheating. When they’re cheating at Harvard and the Naval Academy, what else do we need to know? Harvard was so concerned it ignored the problem and upped its endowment goal for the forthcoming year to $6.5 billion. Integrity for sale. We’re still Harvard — give, give, give. When a brand like that is besmirched and doesn’t care, it is a harbinger for worse things to come. Amateur sports is an oxymoron these days. Cheaters abound. In the old days ethics mattered. Not so much today. See again illegal immigration and the problems it has spawned.
- Changing from a reading society (newspaper, magazines, etc.) to a video society. Invisible words cannot and will not ever replace the magic of books, bookstores, newspapers written by ethical professionals, or handwritten letters. Are all major losses. Digital rubbish and ad barrages have transformed us into a sound-bite society. Deep-thinkers change the world, web surfers don’t. And I fear the ship has sailed. Too many are left at the dock.
- Rude impatience. A generation or two ago, courtesy was expected and respect was a given. Part of this we can attribute to the self-centered go-go rush of oversubscribed lives, where people are so focused on self they do not realize how they are perceived by others. But part of it is also comes from not caring about others as much or more as themselves. This is a sad selfishness but a correctable one.
Every day we look at life though the changing lens of a prescription that mixes some of yesterday with a bunch of today. When I looked today, the game ended in a draw.
When answering a rhetorical question like Carly’s — whether or not these are the good old days — the only thing I really know for sure is that each of us is empowered to make this day a really good one for someone.
All we have to do is do it.