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.
