June 7, 2004 - 10:48 p.m.
I got one of those chain e-mails today and felt angry by the time I'd finished it. The premise was this: A young boy talks to his grandmother about all the things that have changed since she was born. She lists off a bunch of things that seem really old, like they've been around forever, and then at the end we learn that she's 58 years old -- a spring chicken (he said, very aware that his mother is reading this). The e-mail ends with the line, "How could so much go wrong in such a short time?"
The e-mail is trying to say that it's a more complicated world now, and that life isn't as simple and gentle as it once was. Sure, but so what?
It talks about how grandma was born before polio shots and AIDS. Polio shots made life simpler by eradicating the disease, if you ask me, and AIDS has always been around --- we just didn't know what to call it until recently. Being aware of AIDS is not a curse on our society; it's a step in the right direction and hopefully that direction will lead us to a place where the disease suffers the same fate that polio did.
The e-mail says "every family had a father and mother." Pfft. Divorce rates may have been lower, who knows. But every family did not have a father and mother. Couples still split up. Parents died (sometimes from the diseases we now know how to eradicate, thank you very much). Some couples should have split but didn't because it was a social taboo. "It's OK if he beats me, as long as I'm not a single mother." Is divorce a good thing? No, it's a painful and horrible thing, but sometimes it's necessary and we should be thankful that our society doesn't crap on people trying to make situations better for themselves and their children.
It calls out fast food, saying when Grandma was born, there was no Pizza Hut or McDonald's. While a steady diet of both won't do your hips, arteries or digestive system any favors, Pizza Hut sponsors a reading program that promotes literacy among hundreds of thousands of children and McDonald's offers free housing to parents whose children have to stay in hospitals far away from home.
Here's another quality line: "We were before gay-rights, computer dating, dual careers, daycare centers and group therapy." Yeah, remember those days when we hated people because of their lifestyle (or perhaps the color of their skin)? Remember back in the good old days when only one member of the household worked and the other's ambitions were never taken seriously? How I yearn for the days when people with real mental problems were told they couldn't talk to anyone about them and that they were the only ones suffering from their particular problem. Oh, sweet nostalgia.
Another good line: "I don't remember any kid blowing his brains out listening to Tommy Dorsey." No, probably not. They had the courtesy to turn off the record player first. People still committed suicide and music has never had much to do with it. Now there are more ways than ever to get people help.
So, this is my longwinded way of saying the following:
Our society always has had problems. We've been ravaged by disease, victimized by hatred, trapped by mental illness and hurt by the actions of others for centuries. CENTURIES. Now we are more aware than ever of those things.
Yes, we live in a more complicated time, but evil and malice would exist even if we were simplistic in our thinking.
We worry about terrorists disrupting our nation, but we're stronger for having dealt with it before.
We worry about illnesses such as AIDS and the epidemic it's causing worldwide, but we know what it is and we know how to fight it. Someday we'll figure out how to win.
We worry about gay rights because our society has finally taken a stand and realized that, just like the oppression of people because of their race, you cannot, for any reason, deny people the right to live and be treated with dignity.
We have medical technology today that saves millions of lives every year. We have a space program that has taken us to the moon and is working on a trip to Mars.
Every moment, humanity's hand reaches higher toward the heavens of innovation, toward more discovery and more advancement. We continually strive to understand more about our world and how to cope with the fragile lives we've been given by whatever Creator we believe in. If understanding those things causes some complication along the way, that's a fair price to pay.
We should appreciate life. We should enjoy simple gifts, like a flower in the sunlight or the way grass smells after a rain, or the way mountains look when they're being brushed with an early-morning haze. But if I ever have to choose between a society that is perfectly happy all the time but vulnerable to things it does not know exists and a society that sometimes worries about things in an attempt to solve the world's problems, you better believe I'll be biting my fingernails over with the rest of humanity.
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