Phones & Newspapers & Moving Ahead

The student in the front row of one of my classes looked awfully young.

“When were you born?” I asked.

“November of 2001,” he said.

“You missed 9/11!” I said.

“I read about it,” he answered.

And I was telling a story about the first fatal accident that I had to investigate. It was in North Carolina in 1997. I mentioned that I flew to Charlotte and then drove to the site without knowing what happened.

“Why didn’t you call the foreman?” The kid asked.

“Because my phone was home hanging on my wall,” I said. “We used to leave the house and only talk to people at the end of the day, or when we got home.”

On Saturday someone sent me a feature story from the Buffalo News on my book ‘Desperation’ and I was instantly sad.

Being featured in the newspaper was so much fun.

Those stories aren’t being told like that anymore because everyone is a reporter now.

And I often think about social media and whether or not it’s a good or bad thing.

I love having information available instantly. When I was a kid, if they Yankees played on the west coast on Monday night, I sometimes had no idea if they won or lost until Wednesday.

Now if a guy hits a homer in Los Angeles I know the distance and the launch angle and the speed at which it left the stadium…

…30 seconds after it lands.

We won’t go to movies again.

All the movies are streamed to our home. We pay for them with a click of a button.

A knock on the door brings a frozen lemonade to our home if we want it.

Everything is convenient…

…and all of the opinions that are spread here and there by anyone and everyone is a downer.

Especially when things simply aren’t true.

Some of the discussions I’ve seen between highly educated professionals and high school dropouts on Twitter are truly comical.

They devolve into a personal battle that gets overly personal and eternally nasty.

“How did you live back in the Stone Age before phones and instagram and tik-tok?” The kid asked me.

“It was fun,” I said. “And I knew it was over one day as I sat at a bar and my wife texted me to ask me where I was. I told her I was still at work and she answered, ‘Your phone is at the bar.’”

The kid laughed.

And those of us who’ve lived through the changes have a hard time remembering how much less stress there was when we could get away from the constant bombardment of texts and emails and phone calls.

I walk away from my phone nowadays and I feel guilty that I may miss something.

That’s a little sad.

This weekend I got 4 straight emails from a work account. On a Saturday afternoon the guy was a little peeved because I didn’t answer quickly enough.

And I thought about my grandfather who saw the first automobile and the first cross-country flights, and the introduction of the television, and a man walk on the moon.

I wonder what he’d think about the instant change of ideas between a Russian troll and a gullible American that results in hatred between Democrats and Republicans.

I wonder what a guy who got his news from Walter Cronkite would think about Tucker Carlson.

And then I think about the year 2058 when that kid sitting in my class will think about the advancements made during his lifetime.

Will he wonder if the world is better off with or without them?

Will he feel the world has passed him by.

“Are you good at technology?” He asked me.

“Some mornings I can’t even turn the television on,” I responded and that got a big laugh.

I wasn’t kidding.

Yeah.

Life might’ve been easier…

…back in the stone ages of the 1990’s.