Missing the Storm

Weather-related incidents can mark the mental timeline we use to navigate our past.  As one ages, and milestones become fewer and further between, the catastrophes of Mother Nature can help anchor us the way, say, an important national calamity can (do you remember the year of the Challenger explosion or the year the Iran Hostage Crisis began?  I bet you do.  1986 and 1979, respectively, for those of you playing along at home).  I still fondly remember the snow storm of ’79, less fondly the heat wave of ’95, and in Elmhurst where I currently live, people still talk about the flood of ’87.  Unfortunately, they’ll probably also be talking about the flood of 2010 for years to come, the Storm of the Century apparently occurring now every twenty-five years or so.

Floods are particularly harsh disasters to look back on with any kind of nostalgia, but other storms can foster warm memories or inspire animated yarns.  We may not be able to change the weather, and we may lean on the weather for small talk far too often, but living through a natural disaster makes for some good storytelling.   My grandfather used to regale me with stories about the weather, including the blizzard of 1947 in Milwaukee, when he had to abandon the city bus he drove for a living and head for a stranger’s home for shelter.  My son and I like to talk about the storm of August 2007, when we had to flee the highway in favor of Fry’s Electronics, and how it took us an hour to drive the five miles home due to fallen trees at every turn.

Storms can also bring us together, igniting a sense of community that’s so often absent from our lives, especially during the fleeting daylight of winter, when days seem to last no longer than an episode of The Office.  When my wife and I were living in New York in 1995, we knew no one in our apartment complex until the day it snowed.  Suddenly, every abled body was outside with a shovel, unearthing their cars like ancient artifacts.  The forty plus inches of snow in Chicago during December of 2000 helped acclimate my family to our new home as we met neighbors almost daily while we hoisted shovels of snow from our driveways and sidewalks.

As for 2011, I’ll never recall the great snow of two weeks ago when we were hit with twenty-plus inches the way I do past blizzards, because my wife and I happened to be in Las Vegas that week, the first time we’d been away from home without the kids for more than two nights since 1998.  And wouldn’t you know it?  We missed the biggest snow fall since 1967.  Vegas was great, but while we watched the Weather Channel for images of driving snow and the sounds of the very bizarre and, to me, heretofore unheard of “thundersnow,” I wished we could be experiencing it firsthand with the kids.  They’ll forever remember 2011 as the year of the blizzard.  I’ll remember it as the year my wife and I broke even.

At least, that’s what I thought until four days later.  Now we’ll all remember 2011 as the year the Packers won Super Bowl 45.  Fortunately, not all events that anchor our memories are weather-related.

What's Changed in Twenty Years? The PC

When my grandparents were still alive, I felt a strong connection to the reflections they shared of years gone by.  One theme that struck me again and again was the incredible number changes they witnessed during their seventy-plus years.  No other generation, it seemed to me, had undergone a more significant transition than they had.  Automobile to airplanes.   Handguns to nuclear weapons.  Terror of deadly and debilitating diseases to reliable vaccines.  Radio to TV.  Recorded sound, starting with LPs and evolving to CDs, to recorded video, first in a theater, then on TV and then on home video.  The discovery of DNA.  Electronic appliances.  Satellites.  Space travel.  Moon landings.  It’s mindboggling to me how so many of this generation managed to ride the wave of technology with grace.

As a college student in 1990, I once lamented to a friend that my generation (I believe we’re still called Generation X) had witnessed technological advances that paled in comparison to my grandparents’ generation, that there was not much left to discover.  Sure, you could make a car safer or more efficient, or you might allow for personalized space travel, but these achievements would merely be variations on a theme.  What was on the horizon that would truly change our world?

My friend thought about this for a minute, and then answered, “The personal computer!”

Nicely done, Mark.

At that time it was hard to me to recognize how personal computers would change the world, mostly because I didn’t have one.  None of us did.  We’d hoof it over to the computer lab on cold and snowy evenings and attempt to get Pascal to sort our data sets properly, and then we’d wrestle with the dot-matrix printer, rip off the perforated margins of our assignments and trudge back home.

In other words, personal computers weren’t so personal.  My friend Eric had had one as far back as 1985, and in high school he’d allowed me to compose my term paper on Alfred Hitchcock on his Mac.  That was definitely helpful and cool.  But life changing?  And where was MY computer?  Here we were five years later, and nothing much had changed.

My lack of vision when it comes to computers and their eventual counterparts – cell phones, navigation systems, ebooks, and the like – is probably why I’m not an entrepreneur or an innovator.  But did ANYone really see the next twenty years coming?  The first time I heard of the Internet was in 1993.  Could anyone at that time have predicted that in fifteen years there would be Youtube?  Amazon?  Facebook?  Wikipedia?  Googlemaps? 

Obviously, some did.  They’re billionaires now. 

I think it’s fair to say that what we’ve encountered during the past twenty years is as monumental as anything prior generations witnessed in the same span of time.  Maybe even more so.  The rate of change had been staggering, not just in terms of inventions, but it terms of real life changes.  Our ability to access information and communicate with other people is beyond anything most could have ever envisioned (excluding Ray Bradbury, who predicted it all by 1951).

In ten years time, will my children lament to a friend that there’s nothing more to discover?  If they do, I’ve no doubt that they’ll be blown away by the decades to come.  The capacity for human ingenuity is boundless.

Of Overcoming Memories

The most interesting part of a medical procedure I had last week wasn’t the procedure itself or the results (I’m fine) – it was the loss of memory, not only of the event itself, but of the hour or so afterward when I was drinking juice and conversing amiably (I presume) with nurses and my wife.  That I was fully clothed as I became aware of my surroundings was perplexing, but also very cool.  Did I dress myself?  I suspect so, but I have no recollection.  Did I speak to my wife on the way home from the hospital?  I know I did, but again, I can’t actually recall – it’s more of a hunch I have, the same way I used to have a hunch about speaking to a particular person during a drinking binge, but without that nagging sensation of having uttered something monstrously stupid.

Since then, I’ve wondered about amnesia and how wonderful it would be to target memory loss at other episodes in my life:  my three strike-out performance at a baseball game.  Several drunken stupors that should have led to total memory loss, but regrettably didn’t.  Or my high school graduation, during which technical difficulties reduced my slide show that had been set to music, to a silent movie screen and the sound of jeering students.

The movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” my vote for the best movie of the last decade, addresses this desire, as heartbroken characters choose to wipe away all memory of a hurtful relationship.  But the ability to selectively forget a particular event or a particular person would come in mighty handy for others:  consider the aspiring author, songwriter, performer, inventor, entrepreneur, or anyone else whose desires bump up against incredible odds (these days, almost anyone looking for a job).  Imagine how much harder one might endeavor if the memory of past rejections or crushing comments could be erased.

During college, I always admired those who could bounce back so easily after a woman’s rejection.  I remember a friend of mine saying, “She doesn’t want to go out with me.  So what?  The next girl might.”  This is, of course, what separates the most successful people from the rest of us – the ability to either forget one’s failings, or the drive to overcome them.  You may be unmoved by J.K. Rowling’s prose, but she earned her success, for she persevered in the midst of rejection.  Others far more talented than she are still waiting tables because they gave up perhaps one submission too soon while Rowling was sending out yet another manuscript to a prospective agent.

Consider others whose memories are short: the baseball player who erases his last at-bat, the actor who bounces back from a poor review, the doctor who strives even harder after losing a patient, or the philanthropist who overcomes the enormity of a crisis.

Even though I’d still love to forget parts of my high school graduation, I suppose that in my own modest way I’ve used this episode to my advantage.  Ever since that technical breakdown, I’ve been obsessed with preparation when it comes to performing or public speaking engagements. 

But what about the rejections that are sure to accompany the aspiring writer?  There are only two options.  Give up, or get going.  Or, as the Stephen King character narrates in “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”:

Get busy living or get busy dying.

Censorship is Dead: How E-Readers Will Save The World

Earlier this year I read Fahrenheit, 451 to my daughters, and in addition to enjoying the story, I was amazed at Ray Bradbury’s prophetic prowess.  Interactive games, wall-sized TVs, mobile entertainment devices , sound-bites in the news, the dumbing down of society that began with the elimination of classical education – this guy saw it all fifty years before its time.  And he’s still alive, able to comment on today’s technology and how his books are perceived fifty years beyond their time (though some of his works might simply be timeless).

But what really caught my ear while reading the book is the theme of censorship and how it may unexpectedly be a thing of the past (something Ray Bradbury might have been hopeful for, but certainly didn’t predict).  In our modern world of eReaders – my family just purchased its first: a Sony PRS-950 – it’s not unreasonable to think that the advent of electronic books has not only revolutionized book-publishing for the better (and might yet reinvigorate the periodical industry), but has also made censorship an impossibility, a thing of the past, a relic of tyrannical regimes and small, isolated pockets of modern-day society.

For those who might not be familiar with the contents of Bradbury’s book, in Fahrenheit, 451 firemen actually start fires, their target being for the most-part books which been outlawed for years.  The idea that firemen once put OUT fires is a myth spread by liberal-minded folk who are now in jeopardy of being rounded up and eliminated. 

In fact, today physical books ARE being eliminated.  Just last July, Amazon announced that eBook sales outnumbered hard-cover book sales for the prior three months.   And while some may perceive this as bad news, and while there’s still something to be said for curling up with a good book made out of honest-to-goodness paper, I can’t help but think that the advent of electronic books – in addition to making book publishing a more profitable and equitable industry – has all but eliminated the idea that specific books might be eliminated from the face of the earth.  Censorship is, in fact, dead.  This wasn’t the case just over a half a century ago, when the attempted elimination of the Jewish people in Europe was accompanied by the attempted elimination of an entire culture.  Similarly, languages of native people everywhere were too once considered in jeopardy of being eradicated. 

No longer.

If one can e-mail word for word The Bible or Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Huckleberry Finn in a matter of seconds to anyone in the world, it seems implausible that we’ll ever find ourselves in a position to seriously worry about a manuscript’s disappearance. 

Torahs were once in rare supply, but even if every hand-written scroll was confiscated and burned, a million more would survive with the click of a button.

Backward states in the U.S. and backward countries who fear truth and the human condition might try to inhibit the free-flow of ideas and art, but what barrier can they possibly enforce in the modern day?  Even if all the servers in the world were to suddenly break down, or if a space bomb were to destroy the tens of thousands of satellites – working and defunct – that now circle the earth, eReaders would come to save the day.  Unless you can confiscate the electronic reading devices of every man, woman and child, you have no chance of eliminating a book from circulation.  Home printers coupled with eReaders make this idea an impossibility.

The world has shrunk in many ways.  People have become dumber in many ways.  Divisiveness rules the airways.  There’s much to be cynical about.  But censorship – the fear of eliminating a culture, a religion or a language – is now a think of the past.  It’s no longer a threat. 

And this is something to feel good about, a small way in which our society has progressed, a word which  can’t often be attributed to modern man. 

Freedom From Fear

Reading Phillip Roth’s latest novel, Nemesis, about the polio epidemic in 1944 Newark, sparked in me the image of Normal Rockwell’s oil paintings, The Four Freedoms.  These were based, I’ve recently come to learn, on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, in which he professed four essential human freedoms required for a better future: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.  While freedom of speech and religion are ingrained in our consciousness due to their inclusion in the amended U.S. Constitution, it’s the freedom from fear that resonates most with me, and it’s the one most easily taken for granted.  As if the rising body count and horrific happenings of World War II weren’t enough to instill terror in all citizens during the summer of 1944, the polio outbreak caused people to dread the very air they breathed, the water they drank, the hands they shook, the food they ate, the animals who prowled the streets, the neighbor who exhibited signs of illness – all were the possible source of an invisible virus that stole mobility, breath, innocence and the lives of so many people, young and old. 

This combination of war and illness must have terrorized even the most composed person at that time, and I wonder how we’d respond to such threats today.  I recall the aftermath of 9/11, when a tinge of uncertainty even entered the consciousness of those hundreds of miles away from New York and DC.  I took my kids to the Field Museum in downtown Chicago the weekend following the tragedy, and though not crippled with fear, I had a more heightened awareness that morning in the sparsely attended halls of natural history.  And I wondered how much more palpable my fear would have been had the attacks been on a less grand scale.  What if, instead of large buildings, the terrorists had attacked busses, movie theaters and cafes?  How would we have responded then?  Imagine those living today in Bagdad, Ciudad Juarez or Mogadishu. 

Or imagine the fear of parents in Haiti, whose children’s only choice is to drink tainted water.  Imagine the toll that’s taken on those in our own country who live in neighborhoods that make travel by night impossible, whose children’s walks to school are accompanied by the real threat of violence.   Imagine the fear of the young citizens of war-torn countries, whose peaceful slumbers give way to earth-shattering explosions or the crack of gunfire.

I will go through my day today with a concern no greater than what to make for dinner.  It’s a blessing that’s almost impossible to grasp, a gift bestowed upon so few in the world, past or present.  It’s a gift I will work hard not to overlook.