I read a short story by Louis L'Amour today while waiting for the laundry to finish washing. "The Sixth Shotgun" - a nice read, very Western. But it made me sad in a couple of ways.
First - I love Westerns, probably always will, but the older I get the more the violence bothers me. I love the code of the West, cowboys, the good guy wins, and so forth - but, well, there it is.
Second - America is no longer the place it was even 5 years ago. It makes me so sad to think that my grandchild will never know the West as I knew it growing up. Freedom unimagined in most places - lost now with a plethora of laws, taxes, people moving in, culture and attitudes changing so fast it is frightening. In many ways I'm glad my grandparents did not live to see this happen. I know that it is very stressful for my parents - they go so far as to refuse to watch the news any more, or even read the paper. It's just too much to handle.
Change is not always for the better.
Mel put on some Garth Brooks for me this morning while I was reading, just to make the ambience complete, I think. I've always liked a lot of his music, although I am so far behind the times that I have no clue what he's done, if anything, in the past 5 or 6 years. Same with Clint Black and others.
Such is life.
Again - I like the music, but sometimes (a LOT of times!) the words to the songs really bother me. Drunkeness, adultry, murder and so forth are accepted. I guess, though, from what I read about other forms of music nowadays, Country Western is pretty mild.
I guess I'm in a somewhat somber and reflective mood tonight. Thinking about how much the world has changed in such a short time. From what I've read about history, I don't think the world has ever changed this fast, so completely, everywhere at once, ever in before.
I remember being in Alaska and having the knowledge that I could be truly alone there. That was an intriguing thought. Now, even in the wilds of Alaska, or down in Antarctica, or the desert canyons of the American southwest - you can get a cell phone call, or connect to the internet. You can never be truly 'away from it all' any more. Now I realize that satelite coverage is not complete or totally dependable in every place on earth - but even so, there really is no place without technology possible with a bit of planning.
I remember being in Alaska and knowing how far away my family was. Phone calls were expensive and letters took a week or so to arrive. Now - I sit on my chair in the office room of our flat here in Ukraine and watch and listen to my grandson play in his livingroom half a world away, real time. He can't see or hear me - yet - because they are still on dial-up access and two way video cuts them off.
A hundred and 50 years ago, people left their homes in covered wagons and headed West and were often never heard of again. Now, I can talk to my family in the States as I ride the train across Ukraine - if I want to.
Is it really good for us to always be accessable to everyone?
Most of these kinds of advances are nice. Most of them. Then there are other advances.
Like the 'advances' of putting a computer chip in your child so you can make sure that if they are abducted, they can be found quickly. A computer chip, identification chip, in your child??
Advances like doctors here who advise women to abort perfectly healthy babies, telling them that there are major problems showing up on their ultra-sounds - because the doctor wants to sell the healthy tissue for stem cell research.
(As a side note while thinking of doctors and babies - I do NOT understand why doctors and women bombard their tiny developing babies with concentrated sound waves, sometimes several times over the course of a pregnancy! We wonder why there is so much Autism and Aspbergers, ADD and ADHD and other problems with our children now. How can anyone truly say it is "safe" to do that to developing babies? They thought it was safe to give babies oxygen when I was born and I, plus a host of other people in my age bracket, almost lost my sight due to that practice - it took time for the bad effects to show up. Yet - here in Ukraine it is not uncommon to have many ultra-sounds during a healthy pregnancy. I do not understand this practice at all. Why is it so important to see the unborn child in a normal, healthy pregnancy? Humanity made it all the way into the 1970s without every doctor needing to see every baby before it was born. Obviously this is one of my pet peeves. I thank God that my kids have 'clean genes' - no illegal drugs by either their mama or papa, and none of them underwent fetal sound wave bombardment. Good grief - what kind of genetic damage may be being done, all those little genes being developed in their correct order in the DNA, getting blasted by waves of sound, possbly damaged or misplaced - it could take years to discover the damage ...)
Wow. I guess I'm in a mood tonight.
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