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On Getting Old in an Internet Driven World
It’s amazing; sometimes it can take so long to understand something that should be so simple. “How are you today Tom?” ….. “Just waiting to die, just waiting to die.” That was twenty years ago in a nursing home in Maine. I was pastor of a small New England church at the time and standing beside that bed, breathing the disinfected air of a nursing home, it was hard to think of a response. Now, at seventy five, I think I am beginning to understand what he meant. It was simple. It just meant; “I don’t like the world I find myself in.”
I am in China now, I’ve been here for seven years and it’s not China that I dislike, it’s a world that’s falling apart and leading China and itself rapidly on an electronic media leash into what is bound to be a social hell. I live in a disintegrating Chinese family, a family first broken by revolution, then, the pieces shattered by Cultural Revolution. I see young people convinced by media (and lives lived in a world formed by media) who believe that permanent relationships are impossible. I see other young people who see it as a non issue. We are now in a world where many of the men who were condemned for using women, are now role models for women as well as men, and the few young men and women who resist are more and more confused, hurt, or marginalized by their peers.
It’s a world I helped to create and I don’t like what I see. I bought too much of it as it began and failed to fight hard enough against it when I began to see where it was going. We are headed into a world where anomie rules and chaos is normal. I have had my hand in it’s creation but I now see what has been done. The 19th and early 20th centuries were a time of great turmoil. Things calmed down for a while (if we can call a couple of world wars calm,) but it will be far worse this time. China is an example. The Chinese family, the building block of Chinese society, is collapsing. It has already happened in America. Change is the fundamental quality of history, but change has never happened at such a rate and on such a scale as we see in the world today. Between the internet and mass media we are being taught to accept changes in basic values that will without doubt, have tremendous social consequences for both individuals and society itself. We have seen change that accepts what was once seen as “wrong” because it is so common, and rejects many of the rules of the past as either oppressive, wrong, or just obsolete in this new world.
I saw the evils. I was in the American South when bus stations had water fountains labeled “white” and “colored.” It was a world where abuse was accepted: “What do all battered women have in common? They just can’t shut up.” Seeing those water fountains turned me into a radical, and the jokes and attitudes turned me into (at the very least,) a feminist sympathizer. I saw the end of Colonialism and the beginning of a Neo Colonialism that now seems to be morphing into some kind of Multi National Corporate Colonialism. Now, looking back, I see that we have not “thrown out the baby with the bath water.” We have thrown much out, but seem to have saved (in the name of freedom,) the dirty water. Now, we are bathing generations of babies in the dirty water, then throwing them into a world with less and less structure, to develop their own rules for interpersonal behavior. We somehow failed to show our clear rejection of the evils of our society and at the same time displayed a casual attitude to those rules that gave society structure at the basic level. We have failed but I’m not just “waiting to die,” there is still a lot that I must do, but I am certainly not unhappy with being seventy five years old. Now, when I look at where we are going, it’s not at all frightening to know that Sister Death is on her way to guide me to Fiddlers Green.
It’s amazing; sometimes it can take so long to understand something that should be so simple. “How are you today Tom?” ….. “Just waiting to die, just waiting to die.” That was twenty years ago in a nursing home in Maine. I was pastor of a small New England church at the time and standing beside that bed, breathing the disinfected air of a nursing home, it was hard to think of a response. Now, at seventy five, I think I am beginning to understand what he meant. It was simple. It just meant; “I don’t like the world I find myself in.”
I am in China now, I’ve been here for seven years and it’s not China that I dislike, it’s a world that’s falling apart and leading China and itself rapidly on an electronic media leash into what is bound to be a social hell. I live in a disintegrating Chinese family, a family first broken by revolution, then, the pieces shattered by Cultural Revolution. I see young people convinced by media (and lives lived in a world formed by media) who believe that permanent relationships are impossible. I see other young people who see it as a non issue. We are now in a world where many of the men who were condemned for using women, are now role models for women as well as men, and the few young men and women who resist are more and more confused, hurt, or marginalized by their peers.
It’s a world I helped to create and I don’t like what I see. I bought too much of it as it began and failed to fight hard enough against it when I began to see where it was going. We are headed into a world where anomie rules and chaos is normal. I have had my hand in it’s creation but I now see what has been done. The 19th and early 20th centuries were a time of great turmoil. Things calmed down for a while (if we can call a couple of world wars calm,) but it will be far worse this time. China is an example. The Chinese family, the building block of Chinese society, is collapsing. It has already happened in America. Change is the fundamental quality of history, but change has never happened at such a rate and on such a scale as we see in the world today. Between the internet and mass media we are being taught to accept changes in basic values that will without doubt, have tremendous social consequences for both individuals and society itself. We have seen change that accepts what was once seen as “wrong” because it is so common, and rejects many of the rules of the past as either oppressive, wrong, or just obsolete in this new world.
I saw the evils. I was in the American South when bus stations had water fountains labeled “white” and “colored.” It was a world where abuse was accepted: “What do all battered women have in common? They just can’t shut up.” Seeing those water fountains turned me into a radical, and the jokes and attitudes turned me into (at the very least,) a feminist sympathizer. I saw the end of Colonialism and the beginning of a Neo Colonialism that now seems to be morphing into some kind of Multi National Corporate Colonialism. Now, looking back, I see that we have not “thrown out the baby with the bath water.” We have thrown much out, but seem to have saved (in the name of freedom,) the dirty water. Now, we are bathing generations of babies in the dirty water, then throwing them into a world with less and less structure, to develop their own rules for interpersonal behavior. We somehow failed to show our clear rejection of the evils of our society and at the same time displayed a casual attitude to those rules that gave society structure at the basic level. We have failed but I’m not just “waiting to die,” there is still a lot that I must do, but I am certainly not unhappy with being seventy five years old. Now, when I look at where we are going, it’s not at all frightening to know that Sister Death is on her way to guide me to Fiddlers Green.
