Bone In The Throat

A younger person was complaining about the Microwave ovens down in the lunch room. At first I thought it would be that they’re dirty or too busy or something.

What rebooted my brain was when she said they were too slow.

SLOW?!?!?!

I guess it’s that I am really old, or that she was really young but I couldn’t help but laugh.

And I did! I laughed hard and loud.

The young lady couldn’t understand what I found so funny, so I explained that when I was growing up There were no microwave ovens and we actually had to do things like boiling water over a FLAME of all things…

One of my coworkers from Trinidad was laughing too. He said that growing up, he had to carry buckets of water for a shower 3 out of 7 days.

She couldn’t believe what we were saying. Her only response was “Ewwww!”

That made me laugh even harder!

One of the other older guys asked what was so funny, we repeated the original assertion about the slowness of the microwave. The other guy busted up laughing!

The young lady was sooo confused. She had absolutely no idea how we “olders” could have a common experience. After all us “olders” don’t even know how to use the internet to stalk each other. She doesn’t get it that we do know how… we just choose not to.

Later on another young colleague says, “I hope people are nice to me when I’m old.”

I said, “They won’t be!”

He looked at me dumbfounded.

“How do you know?”

I told him, “Look around, look at the pussy hat wearing hateful people protesting against everything and everyone. They’re your generation and as far as they’re concerned, everyone before is responsible for all the ills in the world. And they hate and blame everyone before them all the while fanning the flames of division, asserting they have all the answers. They look at us and hate us for just doing the best we could, and trying to live our lives.”

“That’s dark man.”

“And unfortunately true,” I replied.

He shook his head, then went back to work.

It got me to thinking about the snowflake mentality.

So many of these people have no concept of hardship. They have such an easy comfortable life and they freak out when things like the internet is down, or they can’t make a cell phone call.

They can’t imagine no running water, or the electricity being out. 

I had it a lot easier than my parents. I had it easy because they worked their asses off to make my life better than theirs. Much the same way their parents did for them. I don’t recall a time when the house I lived in didn’t have a telephone or electricity. I do recall that air conditioning wasn’t common except in theaters and business centers. 

I remember wanting to go to the grocery store with my parents during the summertime. Why? Because I could hang out in the frozen food section and it was cool instead of swelteringly hot and humid. 

Movie theaters had great attendance on hot summer nights. Everyone sat quietly in the dark watching a movie because it was better than being outside or at home trying to sleep when the temp was 90 and the humidity was 100%

I remember the novelty of a car with air conditioning. Prior to that, you rolled down the road with all the windows down praying that you made all the traffic lights and didn’t have to stop.

There were no calculators, there were adding machines. They were big, noisy, clunky mechanical things. Rotary telephones were the norm and if it was a multiline phone it was a big deal. Those phones actually used mechanical switches to move between lines.

The first house I recall living in had a party line. If you picked up the phone, you listened for dial tone, if there wasn’t a dial done you heard someone else talking. That was how a lot of the gossip got spread in the neighborhood.  It was impolite to listen in, but sometimes the conversation was just too juicy to ignore.

All of that is gone now, at least in this country. I remember letting the phone ring 10 times and if there was no answer, you called again later. Answering machines were amazing and being able to retrieve your messages remotely, was a big innovation.

I remember the power going off frequently and some people not having a television. It was a big deal when my family got a color TV, and even then lots of shows were only broadcast in black and white, and there were 2 and 1/2 channels depending on the day. Cable was life changing.

All these memories are of a time that the youngsters of today would call hardships. But even as I kid I knew that things were better in my life than they’d been in my parents childhoods. There was an Aunt who had a hand powered water pump built into her kitchen counter. I remember being fascinated with it as a little kid.

My Grandparents used to tell us that we were spoiled. Now that I’ve got a long string of notches on my belt, I see their point. I also begin to understand their dismay when I had trouble with simple things. “No silly, you have to prime the pump. You can’t just keep yanking on that handle and expect water to gush out.”

Life is change.

I suppose that my concern – and that of my grandparents, is that dashing headlong into a technological future that builds dependency on that technology always working, will lead to a very fragile future.

After all how many people know how to make a fire without a lighter? How many people know what’s actually happening when they spin that little wheel?

What happens when the cellular network goes offline? How many people have candles in their pantry? How will you get news or emergency information if everything is coming from the internet? Does anyone even have a working AM radio anymore?

If all the books are digital what happens when there is no power anymore? 

These are things I never really considered until I saw more and more people living with their faces glued to a cell phone screen, and libraries closing due to lack of use.

As I’ve interacted with more and more young people It’s become clear that they will be utterly lost if our fragile infrastructure is damaged or destroyed. Depending on where they are in the world or even our country, they may not be able to access written texts because there won’t be any. Will any of them be able to fix basic machines, or understand simple irrigation systems? 

5000 years in the future, archeologists may well conclude that we had no written language, or that we had limited written communication via a set of glyphs… what we now call emojis. Will Western Civilization enter the realm of legend like Atlantis?

All this makes me wonder about our species, in general. 

We know that asteroid impacts have wrought apocalyptic destruction on our world in the past. It’s reasonable to expect that it could happen again. Would humanity, if it survived, have to start over from the stone age?

I suppose these are some of the things that scientists and futurists ponder. Strip away the technology and what do you end up with? Desperate, scared, hungry humans? A group of animals that are a hairs breadth away from the jungle? 

I wonder if it keeps those scientists up at night?

I wonder if people like me, that know how to make things work would be revered as wise beneficial wizards, or simply put to death for practicing witchcraft.