More Lighthearted DVDs

Day 298: More Lighthearted DVDs

Things have changed since I was a kid. Changed even more since my parents' day. This is the obvious conclusion Sam and I drew today while he interviewed me as a homework assignment for his American history class.

We talked about the movie Selma, which Rich and I saw last night. Back then, Martin Luther King knew specifically what he was advocating when he met with President Johnson. With the stroke of a pen, he said, LBJ could make a significant difference in the day-to-day lives of black people in Selma, Birmingham, and Albany. Remove the barriers to allow black people to vote. Outlaw segregation on the busses and in the schools.

Nowadays, it's hard to know what steps to take to address the problems in society and in the world. The extremists who detonated a bomb at Charlie Hebdo are not comparable to the middle-aged ladies who peaceably demonstrated for their right to vote. What do these extremists want? What would satisfy them? On the other hand, the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were arguably taking cheap shots - sometimes with explicit racism - at a poor and disenfranchised segment of society. Of course, that's no reason to kill them. But it does add complexity.

Is social media and instant communication a good thing or a bad thing? In 1964, the police could have choked Eric Garner and no one would have been the wiser. Much of Martin Luther King's strategy centered around ensuring that when the sheriff took out his barbed-wire-wrapped billy club and used it, The New York Times was there to see it. Nowadays, there's a videocamera everywhere, and it takes only a moment to forward it to the Times. 

On the other hand, a kid swinging in a hammock on a summer day in 1964 might have been watching the clouds float past, or listening to the cicadas, or smelling the lilacs. Nowadays, that same kid might be watching t.v., or tweeting, or playing a video game. And that same kid might be making a judgment about Selma, or Eric Garner, based on what another kid tweeted, and not on a thoughtful and vetted published story by a seasoned reporter.

These DVDs were state-of-the-art when Sam was a toddler. What a blessing it was to pop in a video for the kids to watch while I was making dinner. When I was a kid, my mother had to park us in front of whatever was on t.v., or not. And in her mother's day, t.v. wasn't an option at all. Sam and I talked about how peaceful it might be, not to feel the constant pull of technology.

Things are the way they are, for better or for worse. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.