buffington

Leah described one of her body parts as an olive the other day. I won't say which, but it was all Carrie and I could do not to split our sides laughing while calmly asking "oh, is that so?"

I saw an antique razor the other day - a straight edged razor probably made in the 1930's, and I was stunned at the quality of the razor. It was as if it were sculpted out of a chunk of metal, and no doubt took at least a day of work even with the help of simple machines and tools. I began to wonder how on earth anyone had the time to make such a high quality tool and still make a living, and I was struck with the idea that there was a time when Americans didn't have television or video games sucking away every waking hour. People could make high quality stuff because they had the time to do it, and they didn't pay for gas, or cable, or cell phone bills, or buy all sorts of crap they didn't need. They could afford to take time on things and do things right and make a living out of it.

The same day I went to Costco. In order to go get our essentials (baby wipes, milk, frozen salmon, etc) I had to walk through a maze of plasma screen televisions. Lost in the maze were kids and their parents, mouth agape as they took in the high definition sample of videos of mountains and surf. All wore name brand clothing. All were overweight. All were slaves, tricked by sophisticated marketing into thinking that something that costs $3200 is vital to own, a $3200 device that is a vehicle for further enslavement. It tells all those people lost in its flashing light to buy specific things, to subscribe to specific subscriptions, to take specific political stances, to ignore family and intellectual well being. It wears people down and slots them into specific marketing tracks so they can be more easily marketed to, so that they must work harder, produce cheaper goods at a higher profit, enter into 2 year contracts for mobile phones, satellite channel packages, fast food, prescription meds, and all manner of vehicles to personal enslavement.

Carrie and I removed the television yesterday.

While playing with Google Earth last night it occurred to me that the app, or more importantly, what it allows a person to do, is as significant a change for my generation as changes like the introduction and adoption of automobiles were for my great grandparents, or landing on the moon was for my grandparents.

I'm counting it as the first new technology that is significant enough to produce a distinct generation gap between me and my children. I can't count the Internet as one of those technologies - for the most part both my children and I will have grown up with some kind of network connection and I certainly can't count the personal computer. No other technology comes to mind that has such vast potential, and yet has only been available to the mainstream for a couple of years. Last night I zoomed in on North Korea and saw nuclear missile sites. I saw the crater where the World Trade Centers once stood. I looked at villages wiped out by genocide in Darfur. I couldn't do that before my kids were born, but they'll be able to do it for the rest of their lives.

I wonder if my stupefaction with Google Earth is the same sort of feeling my great grandparents had when a perfectly good horse drawn carriage went putting down the street without the horse. Were they unable, as I am, to explain why it'd change everything?

Will technologies like Google Earth make the world small enough that our children will understand how their behaviors will make an impact on the lives of people living just a mouse drag around the globe away?