Lift Up Your Hearts!

For all I gripe about the short shrift given to public transportation in the United States, I need to take a moment to be thankful for our highways.  Vacation travel in my younger years was more picturesque, as we wandered through small towns and back roads.  But if I-95 is boring, it makes the drive between Pennsylvania and Florida immeasurably more pleasant.

Even with the inevitable traffic jam around Washington, D.C., when your objective is to get from Point A to Point B, travelling 70 mph on a multi-lane road beats without question poking along at 30 mph on a two-lane road, behind a mile-long army convoy, through a construction zone.  The only thing the latter has going for it is that it’s easier to find relief when the kids have to use the bathroom.

(If you travelled on New England’s highways yesterday, you may have a hard time believing that automobile travel could have been worse, and you might be right.  I don’t think we ever experienced anything as bad as Massachusetts/Connecticut traffic on the Sunday after Thanksgiving—or just about any Friday night, for that matter.  I refer you to my previous complaints about our lack of good public transit.)

It’s such a brilliant idea to have one, easily-remembered number to call for all forms of emergency, anywhere in the country.  (Cell phones and Voice Over IP phones have outpaced the 911 system and diminished its power a bit, but it is catching up again.)

I used to have nightmares in which I needed to call the police, or ambulance, or fire department, and kept fumbling through the phone book and not finding the number.  If I finally succeeded, then d-i-a-l-i-n-g the number took so long and my finger always slipped at about the next-to-last digit and I’d have to start over again and by that time the phone book had fallen shut and I had lost the number….

I don’t have those nightmares anymore.

For a normal, healthy person dealing only with minor illnesses—including diseases like measles and chicken pox, which were no big deal for most people—in many ways it was better to be living 50 years ago than now.

(An exception would be for normal childbirth, which had been taken over by hospitals and doctors.  Mothers reclaimed their [ahem] birthright in the late 1970s, only to lose it again, and then to partially regain it—it’s the only branch of medicine that I know to be so cyclical.)

I remember doctors making house calls, and doctors who treating the whole family as a unit, which I believe is healthier for all.  They trusted parents to describe symptoms accurately and as often as not the doctors gave advice over the telephone and saved many a trip—even when they were no longer making house calls.  They still had time to talk with their patients; none of this in-and-out-in-15-minutes assembly line stuff.

However—and it’s a big caveat—for serious illnesses and for emergency medicine, now is a much better time to need medical care.  When I was born, polio was still devastating the country and organ transplants were unheard of.  CAT scans didn’t appear until twenty years later.  From babies to bones, from tumors to head trauma—I hope never to need it, but if I do, I’ll take today’s medical technology with gratitude.

It’s just a pity we can’t have the house calls, too.

I grew up in a monoculture, which was not unusual 50 years ago.  People of other races and cultures were a topic to studied, not friends and neighbors.  I’m thankful today’s American children experience racial and cultural diversity naturally, as part of their daily, normal lives.  To our grandson, a “black lady” is a woman of any race wearing a black dress.

On this Thanksgiving Day, as we prepare for a very traditional American feast, I’ll take time to be thankful for the tremendous variety of food now available from other countries and cultures all over the world.

I’m a great fan of the locavore movement; I know from my childhood that nothing tastes as good as food that not only comes straight from a nearby farm, but also has a distinctive local flavor.  But there is also something to be said for being able to enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables in the middle of winter.

Even better is the opportunity to enjoy fruits, vegetables, spices, and prepared foods that were unheard of when I was growing up:  sushi, satay, tandoori chicken, naan, fajitas, egg rolls, mango lassi, bok choi, passion fruit, kung pao chicken … the list is long of now-common foods that were unavailable to most Americans 50 years ago.  I’d never even had a bagel till I went to college with a large crowd from New York City.

What a multicultural feast our table has become!

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.

When I was a child living in upstate New York, educational choices for most families were simple:  Your children went to the local public school after they turned five years old.  If you were Catholic, you had one more choice:  parochial school.

Later we moved to the Philadelphia Main Line, where there were several well-established private schools to choose from—if you were wealthy and willing to commute.

Today?  There still isn’t as much choice as I would like, as the system is heavily weighted in favor of public schools and against parents who choose another path.  But tremendous improvements have been made.

• Education is now provided for all children; in the past, “all children are to be provided a free, public education” often did not apply to children with handicaps.
• Homeschooling is legal in every state, albeit with varying degrees of governmental interference.
• Within the home education realm itself, materials and support (and with them, options) have exploded over the last 20 years.
• Private school options have multiplied:  non-Catholic Christian schools, Muslim schools, Montessori schools, unschools, specialty academic schools—if there’s an idea, someone has turned it into a school.
• Public school options have also multiplied, with magnet schools, charter schools, and in some (too few) places even the right to choose which regular public school to attend.  Even limited competition has encouraged public schools to be less complacent.

Would I call the system great?  No.  In some ways schooling is worse now than when I was a child, although to be fair that’s mostly due to sociological changes.  But overall the system is much better than it was 50, or even 25 years ago, because we have choices.  Whether in the end we choose public, private, or home education—or a combination thereof—we (and our children) are better off for having the opportunity to make these decisions, rather than passively accepting the status quo.

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.

Not that missed calls are so much of a problem anymore.  Various answering devices have all but eliminated the slavery induced by the fear that this call is the all-important, critical one from your boss, or from a family member in trouble, and therefore it has the right to interrupt any and all other activities—even though nine times out of ten it turns out to be a sales call and 999 out of 1000 is something that could have waited.  Call forwarding technology performs a similar liberating function, especially the kind that allows one to forward only calls from specific numbers.

Call waiting, annoying as it sometimes is, is a boon to those who like to have long telephone conversations—and to those who share a phone line with them.

Cell phones?  Yes, they have in one sense tethered us.  (What do you mean I can’t reach you on vacation?  Don’t you have a cell phone?) But the freedom they have bestowed is even greater, especially on women and children.  Think about driving (or letting your child drive!) alone late at night without a cell phone, and you’ll see what I mean.^**

I won’t get into Blackberries, iPhones, and other amazing devices here, because I don’t own one.  Yet.  It’s really hard to think about giving up my $100/year cell phone plan.  But they have liberated many people from the need to lug their computers around with them, which I can appreciate.

Voice over IP and video calling?  One word:  Grandchildren. 

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!)

Those were the days when girls took home economics classes and boys took shop.   Period.  End of story.

There’s no point in detailing all the restrictions—there are too many, and this is about thanksgiving, not griping—but here’s one I just learned:  Until the late 1960s no woman could run officially in the Boston Marathon.  My running friend says women were told they would damage their bodies if they tried to run such a long distance.  (Now some of the best ultramarathon runners are women.)

I rode the crest of the wave of change, with doors opening all around me.  I was the first (and only) girl in my high school’s jazz band, the only girl in my Boy Scout Explorer post, the only girl in many of my physics classes.

It’s true that in our enthusiasm we’ve allowed the pendulum to swing too far, forcing women to face a different kind of restriction:  While a myriad other opportunities were becoming available, women were finding it more and more difficult to choose the noble career of homemaking that had for millenia been taken for granted as their birthright (and duty).

A course correction is necessary to fix this injustice, but let’s not lose sight of what we have gained, nor be tempted to push the pendulum back too far.  These may be perilous times, but if you’re a woman, you don’t really want to go back to the 1950s.

I’m thankful that today’s girls can dream about becoming astronauts.^*  Or whatever else they might want to be and to do.

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.

Finally, cans and bottles began to be recycled, but one had to be committed to the cause to drive one’s accumulation to a place that would accept it.

Today we have two recycling bins in our garage, one for newspapers, magazines, and cardboard; the other for steel cans, aluminum cans, glass, and all forms of plastic with a recycling number.  Once a week a special truck comes right to our driveway and empties them.  At the grocery store I can easily recycle plastic bags and Styrofoam.  Other cities collect office paper.  Auto parts stores will accept used motor oil.

Recycling is no longer a money-making proposition, at least not for most individual citizens, but curbside collection has greatly improved community involvement.  We may never reach the remarkable Swiss compliance rate (81% for PETE plastic, 91% for aluminum cans, 60-80% for other forms of aluminum, 94.6% for glass bottles and containers) but it’s certainly better than it was 40 years ago.

We’ve always recycled whenever we could (and try to reuse, and use less, as well), but I’m thankful for community-based recycling, both for the convenience and for the way it encourages widespread participation.

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.

(It was also seriously suggested that we spread dirt on the polar ice cap to help counteract the global cooling that was threatening our environment, but that’s a different issue.)

I think today’s generation will not believe the societal pressure there was back then to have no more than two children.  If you’ve read Ender’s Game, think what it was like to be a “Third” in that society:  Having a third child was nearly as bad here.  I remember a friend who hoped for twins her second pregnancy, on the grounds that that was the only way she could have more than two children without having scorn heaped upon her.  Families with “extra” kids were clearly irresponsible and incompetent at birth control.

Nowadays many have decided that they like the one to one parent/child ratio—so many, in fact, that the birth rate in some countries has fallen below the replacement level—but  there’s a lot more choice going into that decision than there was in our day.  That’s a good thing.

An even better thing?  That some families now feel free to enjoy three, four, or even many more children.

The best thing?  In my case, more grandchildren!

For them, I’m especially thankful.

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.