Lift Up Your Hearts!

I can’t quite bring myself to say directly that I’m thankful for television, because I believe it has done great harm in our society, but it would be wrong to ignore the enormous educational and cultural benefits this technology has conferred.  As strong a proponent as I am of the written word, some second-hand experiences are much better approached in a video format.  From African safaris to Wagnerian opera, video provides formerly elite experiences to the hoi polloi.  It’s not the real thing—but even the very rich cannot experience everything directly.

Thus I am also thankful for the technology that has enabled us to be masters of this medium.  In my early days we had no television at all, but it didn’t take long to become enslaved.  Life was planned around when favorite shows were on, because if you weren’t watching at that very hour, you missed it.  I remember (to my shame) being reduced to tearful anger because our babysitter wouldn’t change the channel from her favorite show to mine.

It's true that we are, as a society, still enthralled.  But we don’t need to be.  We have the tools to use the medium for good purposes and ignore all the rest.

When I give thanks for modern dentistry, I’m not referring to the practice of some dentists, which is to do any dental work that might involve pain using some form of anesthesia.  It is good for children to learn how to handle pain in small doses.   Life is not pain-free, and the habit of seeking medication for every ill is a dangerous one.  Personally, I’d much rather deal with the temporary, minor pain of the dentist’s drill than the risk and after-effects of anesthesia.  Moreover, when the patient is aware of where the dentist is probing, the dentist is more likely to notice if he’s gone too far or found a trouble spot.

That said, the improvements in dentistry since I was a child have been vast.  The drills back then were slow, and much more painful. (Porter’s dentist even used a foot pedal powered drill for a while!)  Today’s high-speed drills are almost a pleasure (I said almost) in comparison.

Thanks to fluoride (however controversial it is when put in public water supplies), to dental sealants, and to better attention given to tooth and gum care, even before a baby gets its first tooth, children have many fewer cavities today.  Orthodontia has made badly crooked teeth a thing of the past.  Onlays, crowns, bridges, and dental implants have greatly extended the life of our natural teeth and delayed the need for dentures.

The need to repair dental caries is so low these days that dentists have taken to whitening teeth to stay in business.  What they’ll do if we ever kick our tremendous sugar habit, I don’t know.

How I love the smell of clothes dried outside in the sunshine and a soft breeze!   Especially bed linens; no perfume exists that can beat that scent on a pillow.  It’s a pleasure most American children have never experienced, but it was many years before my mother had the luxury of an automatic clothes dryer.

Dryers are not a necessity, even in highly-developed countries, as our visits to Japan and Europe have shown me.  And yet when the weather is grey and drizzly, when children come in from playing in the snow with their winter clothing dripping with icy water, if one has better things to do with one’s time than iron clothes, or when one would simply like to have clean clothes available in fewer than twenty-four hours, to be able to toss the wet items into a machine and have them warm and dry in an hour is a great blessing.

You’re surprised I waited so long for this one, right?  I value home education so highly that my gratitude for that privilege almost goes without saying.  (But gratitude should never go without saying.)   Because my joyous thanksgiving for the legal protection that homeschoolers now enjoy cannot be overstated, I will understate it here.

Educational opportunities have expanded for everyone, not just homeschoolers, over the last 50 years. (More)

I’m thankful for push-button phones, cordless phones, cell phones, answering machines, voice mail, Voice over IP, and video calling.

I didn't mind dialing a number—numbers were shorter back then—but phone buttons are used for a lot more than dialing these days, and that became possible when the clicks were replaced by tones.  (Can anyone besides me remember phones that converted button presses into clicks?)

Once upon a time the 25-foot phone cord was the great new technology that let one actually get some work done while talking on the telephone.  It was almost always in the kitchen, where it may have caused a child to trip or become entangled, but was overall much safer than using a cell phone while driving.^*  Still, cordless phones are much more fun, enabling work to be done in other parts of the house … and poolside relaxation without fear of missed calls. (More)

By now you’re tired of hearing me say this, but you won’t believe…

…the things one couldn’t do without a Y chromosome when I was growing up.

My own parents were great—and a bit ahead of their time—at encouraging me not to be fenced in by my sex.  I had backhoes and construction sets as well as dolls for toys.  I was encouraged to climb trees—and mountains.   But society at large was still severely restrictive.

In sixth grade I expressed the wish to be an astronaut, and was emphatically told by my (male) teacher that girls could never be astronauts, because all astronauts had to be test pilots, and test pilots were only men.  (Take that, Sally Ride!) (More)

I am of the last generation to know what life was like before pocket calculators.  Even that name is revealing; who calls them that anymore?  Who remembers when “adding machines” were big, clunky things like typewriters?  (Have you seen a typewriter outside of a museum or an old movie?)

I remember my parents doing their taxes with a nifty little plastic device with a set of numbered dials like a telephone.  (Uh, who remembers dial phones?)  There was a 1’s dial, a 10’s dial, a 100’s dial, etc. and you used a stylus to turn them to the correct numbers.  You could add and subtract by turning the dials clockwise or counterclockwise.  The device was handy for checking all those tax numbers, and lots of fun for me when I could get my hands on it.

As a science major in college, I had many tedious calculations to do, and often found it worthwhile to make a trek through the cold and snowy winter night to use one of the half dozen Wang calculators made available to students by the physics department.

When I graduated from college, I received a thrilling (and expensive) gift:  A Texas Instruments SR-10 calculator!  It was especially cool because it handled scientific notation.  Take a look at the keyboard and note that it did a whole lot less than the calculators you can buy today for $10 at your friendly neighborhood Walmart.  The last time I visited the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, I found my wonderful graduation present on display amongst the other relics.

I firmly believe that everyone should know how to do basic arithmetic functions easily and quickly, and think it’s deplorable that we have cashiers who can’t make change without a register to do the calculations.  I’ve never forgotten Isaac Asimov’s prescient story, The Feeling of Power (1958).

I also believe that everyone should know how to make bread, but that doesn’t stop me from being thankful to be able to buy bread at the store.

Thus, without apology, I am thankful for the handy, portable, convenient, powerful, inexpensive, labor-saving pocket calculator.

When I was young there was no such thing as recycling, per se.  We still produced a whole lot less trash than the average family today, because we had a whole lot less stuff, and what we had was often reused (e.g. milk bottles).  Food scraps went, not into the trash or down the sink, but into a compost pile in the back yard, where hardworking worms and bugs and microbes recycled it their own way into fertile soil.

Times changed.  Almost without being aware of it we had become a disposable society, and our piles of trash grew.  And grew.  Newspapers could be recycled—indeed, one could make good money by collecting people’s old papers and taking them to the paper plant.  But metal, glass, and the ubiquitous varieties of plastic went straight to the landfill. (More)

Think “reproductive freedom” and what comes to mind?  Birth control?  Abortion-on-demand?  The freedom, in short, not to reproduce while indulging in the activity specifically designed for reproduction?

What I’m thankful for is the inverse.

My generation grew up in the days of Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and fears that the world would outgrow its food supply by the mid-1980s.  It was seriously suggested that giving aid to distressed peoples was morally wrong, on the grounds that helping them now would only enable them to reproduce and then more people would starve to death later. (More)

Overall, society has become much ruder, cruder, and lewder than it was 50, or even 25, years ago.  But sexual harassment, if hardly a thing of the past, is at least—like smoking—generally disapproved of, and the woman on the receiving end of a “friendly” pat on the rear from her boss or suggestive remarks from her co-workers now has legal recourse.  In the past, enduring such treatment was often considered as much a part of the job as making coffee.  (On a personal note, I worked with great people and did not have this kind of problem myself.  I didn’t make the coffee, either.)

Maybe we’ve gone too far in enforcing the new rules—suspending a kindergartener for kissing a classmate comes to mind—but for the most part they are in place because they are necessary.  I’m thankful for this civility.

It’s okay—it’s good—to be thankful for small things, too.  It may not be an earthshaking improvement, but I’m thankful for digital cameras.  One key to taking good photographs is taking lots of photographs, and in times past only the professional could afford to do so.  Now anyone can.

Digital cameras are also great for children.  Instant feedback is so much more satisfying than waiting to finish the roll of film so it could be developed—and not wanting to waste any pictures because film + developing = a lot of money.  Now there are cameras that let the youngest learn to take good photographs.

What’s more, good cameras—even video cameras—are small enough to carry in a purse.  A small purse!  Our first video camera was a huge monster that took full-sized VHS tapes.

Organizing photos into albums has never been easier, and there are so many more wonderful things you can do to present them.  On the other hand, having so many more pictures and options makes more work, even if the work is easier.

But that’s a minor quibble.  I love my tiny, handy, good-quality digital camera!

There’s no doubt the sociological upheavals caused by the so-called Women’s Liberation Movement have done much harm, but one great thing to come out of that time is a greater closeness between fathers and their children. 

My father was always actively involved with his children—unusually so for that generation, I believe—even before my mother’s early death forced him to take on double parenting duty.  And yet in his journals of our early years he always refers to the times my mother was not at home as times when he was “babysitting the children.”  No one I know with young children in this century would even think such a thought, much less express it.  How can one “babysit” one’s own child? (More)

It’s quite possible that the environment we live in is in worse shape now than 50 years ago, especially in places like China and Africa.  But here, now, it looks, tastes, and smells a lot better.  And not just because fewer people are smoking.

I remember when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, and when it was said you could develop film in the Genesee downstream from the Kodak factory.  My father worked for General Electric in Schenectady, and used to say that they returned the water to the Mohawk cleaner than it was when they took it out, which was no doubt true but should not be taken as an endorsement of the effluent.

The air in Pittsburgh was so full of smoke and particulates that when the Church of the Ascension expanded, they used black stone in order to match the soot-darkened original.

Automobile exhaust was something awful.  It’s not nice even now to walk or bike along a road full of cars, but nothing like what it was before pollution controls.

I even remember when the Freihofer bread delivery truck was horse-drawn, and you can guess what that did to the streets.  (But I loved to sit on our porch and watch it pass by!)

Environmentally, this is not a secure time to be living.   What’s more, I know that the improvements to our air and water quality are only partly because of pollution control laws.  Pittsburgh is a clean, breathable city because they no longer make steel in the home of the Steelers.  We have outsourced and off-shored our pollution as well as our jobs.

But when it comes to breathing and drinking, I’m thankful for today.

This post could also be viewed as a mere excuse for sharing my favorite Tom Lehrer song of that era.

Into the Silent Land:  A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation , by Martin Laird  (Oxford University Press, 2006)

The physical benefits of meditative techniques are well established, and I’d like to be able to take advantage of them.  What has hindered me is that many—though not all—of the studies have focused on Transcendental Meditation (TM), the Eastern religious aspects of which have led me to keep meditation in general at arm’s length since I first learned of it some 40 years ago.  It will not do to gain a physical benefit at a spiritual loss—I can’t help thinking of The Magician’s Nephew, in which Digory was tempted to steal an apple that would have cured his dying mother, but if he had done so, both he and his mother would have later “looked back and said it would have been better to die in that illness.”

Yet Digory, having passed the test, was eventually given another apple, one that healed his mother in the right way. (More)

What would today be without being thankful for our veterans, and all who work and sacrifice to protect the rest of us?

In the spirit of the Good New Days, I’m also thankful for our all-volunteer military.  The military draft cast a long, difficult, and painful shadow on life in the 1960s and 70s.  In that respect it is much better to be young today.  A career in the armed services can be a very good choice—but it should be just that, a choice.  It’s better for families, for society, and for the military as well.