Losing my frame of reference

I feel as if my life’s frame of reference is slipping out of my reach.

This isn’t a “time is passing so fast now” experience. It is one of context. The context that has shaped my life is forgotten or, in the case of my young students (born in 1996, sheesh!), has never ever been learned.

That younger people vaguely remember or don’t care even to learn about the life altering events of the past leaves me feeling diminished or inadequate somehow. As if what I have to share has no worth.

I feel like celluloid film that is drying up, cracking and turning to dust in my ignored tin. If all of that is lost, forgotten, ignored, underappreciated, what happens to the rest of me? The whole me?

My college journalism training began in the thick of Watergate. It’s a frame of reference --- context --- for anyone who studies investigative reporting, politics, and history. Yet, my students today, having been born two decades after the scandal, may have memorized Nixon’s name among all of the presidents in grade school, and perhaps they recall that he was forced to resign for something, but what is kind of hazy.

Watergate is as unknown to them as the “global village” theory of the 70s. You know, the global village they are now living in thanks to the Internet. (I have a student who travels daily to Spain to practice his Spanish via the application Periscope, where he talks to Spaniards and visits live lectures in Spanish and is able to interact with the speakers and other online audience members.)

In my lifetime, free citizens of African decent were still (are still) fighting and dying for the rights guaranteed to them 100 years before (Civil War) and even earlier in our Constitution. The knowledge that people around me, people I knew were not (are not) equally enjoying the privileges and protections of this country DID shape my life. Now, though, that’s just the stuff for some history books. Those who are not directly affected have no frame a reference for it, no context.

I recently pointed out to a media class that the FCC has determined the cable providers can no longer require customers to rent their cable boxes. If we do the monthly rental fee math for a life-time of rental fees we can easily figure out why these companies are making healthy profits. How much could one cable box really cost? U.S. Senators Edward Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) reported last July, in preparation for the FCC decision, that the rental boxes are worth $19.5 billion a year to the cable industry. Hello! Seriously, how much could that box cost to make? Ars Technica, an online technology blog reports that the average household pays $232 a year on cable box rentals, suggesting that the boxes are well paid for even in the first year of rental. (Ars Technica, July 30, 2015)

My students weren’t shocked, offended or outraged by such a bilking of the viewing audience. Their response was to just stare at me as if wondering aloud why I would bring this up in a media class.

I’m the one who was shocked when I realized that these students have little or no frame of reference for cable boxes. They are the unplugged generation. They don’t have cable, so no cable boxes either. They get all of their media on smartphones, tablets and computers. For many, email is also a vintage idea having been replaced by texting and social media forms of communication with friends and family. Cable boxes are as foreign to these 20-somethings as are CD players and newspapers. Don’t even mention typewriters and record players. ;-)

Welcome to the generation gap, where the “when I was your age,” stories are not welcomed by the younger recipients because they have no frame of reference. Give it 40 years and they will be wishing they’d listened more closely.

It’s as if we are on slightly different plains with the generations that follow --- just enough off kilter and out of the frame that what we offer is too foreign for them to put into a context for their own understanding.

So here I am at an age when this epiphany can only happen and with no one younger willing to listen or able to understand the awareness that just smacked me in the face. No wonder bad history repeats itself. And what energy we are wasting on that repetition. We have the lessons just too few willing to learn them.

I’m pretty sure that all that’s left of me in my frame of reference is the bad profile side of my nose.