The World That Children Forgot

I was born in the wrong decade. These days you’ll often hear hip, loquacious philistines trying to pretend they were around when punk broke, or acting as though they were there right alongside Kerouac and Ginsberg at City Lights. I, however, am not one of those a******s. What I mean here, is that looking back through the Rolodex of history, I can’t seem to find any stretch of time that would truly measure up. There always seems to be some blemish in every time period, like trying to buy a nicely priced used book, maybe even first edition, but always some a*****e (I’d guess the same a*****e that writes “F**k you” on elementary school walls) has taken to underlining all of chapter three--your favorite part of the book. So my own childhood ended up being a conglomerate of time.
    Dave’s Diner is where I learned soul. It wasn’t actually a diner, it was a radio show that came out of somewhere in Idaho, with a DJ that didn’t believe in music after nineteen-seventy. While other kids my age were diving headfirst into the mess of mid nineties Mainstream, I was being spoon fed Del Shannon, Roy Orbison, Bill Withers, The Temptations, The Supremes, The Zombies, and endless other artists that----in one take, usually----laid down some of the most influential music ever made. I started tuning away from the garbage of “Hard Rock” and “Adult Contemporary”, which all sounded whiny or overly angry, and permanently set my radio to the Oldies station, where I was rarely, if ever, betrayed by the music director.
    Modern television programming also felt like an eyesore to me, and the things I usually preferred to watch were black-and-white, often with terrible laugh tracks. Gilligan, Lassie, and Looney Tunes intrigued me more than most of the flash-produced animated garbage on Saturday mornings. The first films I began to cherish were ones made in the heart of the eighties, already ten years old, but to me they were better than half of the nonsense I saw weekly trailers for. I wished for spinning top competitions on the school playground instead of paper POGs. I wanted malt shops instead of the Mall. And most of all I wanted some semblance of feeling like I belonged somewhere.
    I started groping through the stacks of history for more inklings of the purity I found in old things. I’m sure I had a false sense of what the “Olden Days” were really like, but I still imagined they had to be better than the loud and superficial time I was living in. I dove into books, the more remote the subject matter the better, and tried to push away the increasingly common neon and crystal displays.
    Public schools in Montana were sub par, and I’m being polite. My elementary school still had a computer lab full of Apple III’s, and we all understood exactly why there were called floppy disks. I relish the fact that their funding was so bad, because it gave me early opportunities to appreciate simple technology. Oregon Trail at school and an Atari 2600 at home, nothing but culture for this little boy. Kids today have cell phones that can teach them foreign languages or play any song ever recorded, but the stuff is wasted on these grubby handed gluttons.
    My generation is the last one to have seen the actual arc, and to understand how truly amazing and horrifying something like the Internet actually is. We saw things progress from corded house phones to Skype, wobbling record and cassette tapes to something called a Compact Disc and its annoying fragility.
    And I’m not sure if we’re better off with any of this junk.
    All these toys that help brainwash and baby us aim to only dumb us down, and strip the purity from simple acts. This new batch of delinquents has me worried, and I’m wondering if the end of everything won’t come from a mass plague or global warming, but from countless heads hunched over tiny screens while life passes them by.    

Reviews

[DavidRyanM]

Strong piece, man. From beginning to end, I was hooked. I related to this whole thing because I, of course, grew up with everything you're "looking back on", and have always been strongly convinced that everything used to be better. Sure, like the story says, everything is easier now and more accessible, but the purity of everything has been deluded if not completely excluded from everything we have now. I miss the old days. I miss the Zombies and sitting by my radio, recording each one onto a tape. I wonder though, had we had back then what we have now, would we be as smart as we are? Or would we just be like the youth of today?