Posts
The world has changed so much that I feel like I’m living on a different planet from the rural Yankee town where I grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s.
To gauge how the U.S. Has changed, I watched a documentary on PBS examining those exact years that featured Walt Disney, who was then building Disneyland to show “America's future.”1
In terms of predicting new inventions, Walt got a lot of things right: “Disneyland, made up of four "lands," opened in July 1955. One of the four, Tomorrowland, featured rocket rides "to the moon"; the Monsanto House of the Future, made entirely of plastic and displaying cutting-edge kitchen appliances; and a futuristic replica of Los Angeles' emerging freeway system. Tomorrowland was imbued with optimism for the future and confidence in American superiority.”2
Indeed, we accomplished most of those things: We rocketed to the moon but now find ourselves submerged in plastic and choked by highways, cloverleafs, and high-tech gadgets. Paradoxically, despite achieving the future we thought we wanted, we’ve lost our spunk and optimism: in fact, a majority of us now believe our country is heading in the wrong direction.
What the show missed were the cataclysmic changes that erupted between then and now, totally upending our societal norms and former way of life. Growing up in the early 1950s, I lived in radically different circumstances before the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Woodstock, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and all the other major historical shifts that transpired – all the way up to this week when we swore in our new president who spurns the constitution and pretends he is our king.
Thinking back on it now, I feel like a modern-day Rip Van Wrinkle who fell asleep in third grade and woke up nearly 80 years later living in this strange new land. The last thing I remember was sitting at my desk practicing cursive penmanship at my old Northwood Narrows school, which had two classrooms downstairs and a meeting room upstairs.
My only reference material was an old set of encyclopedias housed in the local library. The town contracted with a neighborhood farmer to transport us kids who lived on Jenness Pond to school in his old Jeep station wagon that smelled of hay and manure. We didn’t get our first TV until I was in the fourth grade.
Jenness Pond Road was dirt and often impassible during mud season. When that happened, we had to leave the family car half a mile away from home and walk in. During those times, our ancient neighbor, who we called Tib, would save time by cutting across the ice rather than taking the longer route by land. We were a little afraid of him, thinking he might have magical powers because he never fell through the crumbling, rotten ice and drowned.
After growing up in the sparse simplicity of rural New Hampshire, a significant chunk of what has happened since seems like a bad dream. While we had to practice ridiculous ‘duck and cover’ drills designed to protect us from an imminent Russian nuclear attack that never came, today, we are facing existential dangers on multiple fronts, many of them unimaginable in the 1950s.
The original Rip Van Wrinkle, written by Washington Irving, was a fable about how America was founded. I’m afraid that I am presiding over its unraveling – along with the Earth itself.
xxx
1 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tupperware-future/
2 Ibid.
