Thoughts on time

I read a lot of semi-weird and fully weird news stories.  They interest me.  I read about everything from wild weather, to multiple and over sized babies, to unjust punishment of children.  Good and bad things.  For about half of the stories I read, I ask myself how this would have been 50 years ago.  A lot has changed in 50 years; some good, some bad.  The proportion of bad to good change is up for debate.

This story in particular creates an interesting perspective on how the our world has changed.  To save you reading it (so you can read more of this savory blog), it is about a group of four teenagers who create a fake Facebook profile to degrade another teen.  They use the account to stage him as a homosexual and a racist (claims second and third in disgust on to “terrorist”).  That fake profile collects nearly 600 friends.  To make things ok, the parent of the boy is suing the four others.  It is the typical lawsuit over defamation.  Mom accuses the 4 teens of causing the boy to suffer from “severe emotional distress” and “humiliation and embarrassment” and requests money to fix everything.  The amount sought was not released.

I learned 60% of what I know about the late 1950’s from television and movies.  20% more I have absorbed from my mom and grandparents over the years.  The other 20% came from textbooks and some things I have just made up.  Usually, if someone says 1959, I picture “Leave it to Beaver”, a television show that ran from 1958-1963.

Not everyone will agree with me, but “Leave it to Beaver” is about as boring as television shows come.  And I mean come on, we have had 50 years to get better at it, and like 10 times as many people to act and direct and paint sets.  It seems like most people who still watch “Leave it to Beaver” and similar shows only do so for the nostalgic purposes.  And when I hear stories like the one from above, I can understand why.  It is hard to put a news story like the one from above in a situation from Beaver’s time.  It just doesn’t fit at all.  The simple fact that I am blogging about it creates plenty of problems on its own.

Beaver, you gotta lot of explaining to do!

So how far have we, as a society come?  Are we better off now than we were then?  I know news stories like the one above are rare, and the internet allows us to access vast amounts of information, far more than we were able to reach even just 10 years ago.  But in Beaver’s day, this couldn’t have happened.  There was no Facebook, no internet, little telephone, and when kids wanted to talk to each other, they met at the park.  If something remotely like this ever occurred, the 4 teenagers fathers would have beat them, and they would have never done it again.

Are we better off now, really?  Well, yes.  Facebook is awesome, I have to be able to watch football on my cell phone, and I would die if I couldn’t Twitter or if my ipod held less than 200 songs.  But in other ways, we are worse off.  You do not have to read much news to know that.  It is ok for now, but what if in 50 years , people look back at 2009 and say “this wouldn’t have happened back then,” and they watch The Office and House for nostalgia.  I, for one, am ready.  I have my DVD’s, I know a good attorney, and I know how to teach my kids to create a fake email.  You can’t sue them if you don’t know who they are.