Month: March 2014

Is it 1984 yet?

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Spring has arrived, but winter has barricaded the door. I’m in a dark mood.

 

At times like this, I admit that I don’t always keep my paranoia on a leash. In fact, I often let it run wild, allowing it to chase hare-brained rabbits down various trails or follow the scent of little chickens warning that the sky is falling.

 

Naturally it’s not my fault I’m so paranoid. I blame it on the book 1984 by George Orwell. I don’t know about your mind, but in my mind, for pure fear, no other book comes close. * On the dystopian spectrum, it’s on the far end of terror.

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On the other end, in what could be called the “happy” dystopia, lies Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. Published in 1932, it envisions a world of people manacled by drug-induced happiness, materialism, and sex, a world that sounds surprisingly like our own. Seventeen years later, post-World War II, Orwell published his book, depicting a world enslaved by fear, with a seemingly benevolent Big Brother in control of past, present, and future.

 

In the actual year 1984 at a panel convened to discuss Orwell’s dystopia and the modern world, the educator Neil Postman proposed that contemporary Western society reflected Huxley’s view of the future rather than Orwell’s. Postman equated the entertainment industry with the drug soma that people in Brave New World used to escape into happiness. The following year Postman published his insights in a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, I encourage you to do so.

 

I tend to agree with Postman, yet North Korea stands as a reminder that Orwellian governments can and do exist. My own fear is that the two will blend, and we’ll end up with a Brave New 1984: a populace condemned to artificial happiness found in drugs, sex, acquisition, and entertainment, who relinquishes all control to a Big Brother who will not allow anyone off Paradise Island.

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While brooding through winter’s siege, I have been reading about school libraries closing due to budget cuts and others removing their books because of the availability of so much online information. Why bother funding libraries and librarians when you have Google? Why house all those dust-loving books when they can be downloaded and read on e-readers?

 

My paranoia and I find this disturbing. Online information is stored at physical locations. Whoever owns these data centers effectively owns the information, as does whoever controls the electricity and power grid that allows people to access the servers or charge their electronic devices. As long as there are everyone checks and balances, and everyone involved believes in net neutrality and open access, we are fine. But what happens if unchecked power controls access?

 

You can’t turn off a book. And you don’t need electricity to read one. We need books, and we need libraries full of books. Children especially need a place to go to explore the world of ideas, a quiet place to read books of their own choosing.

 

I’m not against e-books and online copies. I enjoy my electronics. They have their place, and that place is next to books, not in place of books.

 

Stitched Panorama

 

*Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road would equal 1984 on the terror scale if it were a sustainable world. It is a dying world that will end; the horror of 1984 is that there is no end in sight.

 

Photos: 
Big Brother: Paternm
Surveillance Cameras: Hustvedt
Books: © Hans Hillewaert / CC-BY-SA-3.0

 

Carried by hands

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Hand Reaching

She comes out to greet me in the waiting room. I haven’t been waiting long. It is at day’s end and my work is finished. During the wait, I scratch in my final words to tell her what I need. I will not need to speak anymore.

She leads me into the room. In the dim light I notice only the table and chair. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she says. I leave all of my clothes on the chair and wall hook; then I crawl under the covers and wait for the knock.

I lie on my stomach, my face cradled in the open circle at the top of the table. She turns on music, soft flutes and ocean waves.

I yield to her hands, oiled and searching. She finds my pain. Some aches I knew I carried; others lie hidden, deep within me. She seeks them out – knots of worry, muscles clenched, holding their breath. She forces them to breathe.

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The pain cannot leave me until I feel it. Worry, long-forgotten deadlines, and anger hide within, cling to my bones. Her hands draw them out.

She murmurs and I turn, eyes closed, heart and mind still. Inside this room, I am outside my life, an in-between place.

I arrived once just as I am now, unclothed, at the mercy of hands. My leaving will be like this. An angel will prepare me for the crossing over. Her hands will find my hurt and pain and carry it away. I have swallowed darkness and sorrow; it clings to my bones. But it will yield to those hands.

We shall not speak; my words, as they are now, will be left there in the waiting room.

Then she will push my barge into the waters and the music will carry me across. And there will be hands, familiar hands, waiting on that other side.

Grand Teton National Park

Back massage photo courtesy of Nick Webb   

A whirled champion

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Sometime around the middle of the last century, my mother, along with millions like her, went boom. Mother boomed thrice. First came my sister, then less than two years later, me. After a ten-year recovery of giving birth to me, she boomed her last and my brother appeared.

George B. Boomer, Union colonel in the Civil War. Considered a pre-Boomer because he was born in 1832.

George B. Boomer, Union colonel in the Civil War. Considered a pre-Boomer because he was born in 1832.

 

If births were sounds, each of the individual 75 million plus births from 1946 to 1964 would have been recorded as a pop about as loud as a burst balloon. Collectively, however, all those little pops would have sounded like the boom of a three-ton bomb. You can take it from me, a notoriously unreliable source, that this is why we are called boomers.

 

Not long after mother boomed me out into the world, the modern hula-hoop was birthed, or more likely extruded, since it was made of plastic tubing.

 

Those plastic tubes appeared in July1958, just about the time I would’ve been getting bored with summer vacation. Another 25 million or more kids were equally bored because that’s how many hula-hoops were sold between July and October of that year. The fad spread worldwide, one could say it circled the globe (if one were an incorrigible punster). After an outbreak of public gyrating, the Japanese  banned it. The Russians denounced it as one more indication of western decadence and went back to drinking vodka.

 

Before the ban: Japanese hula-hooping in 1958.

Before the ban: Japanese hula-hooping in 1958.

Hoops have been around since the time of the Greeks who used metal hoops and probably wore bruises to prove it. Sometime in the 18th century the hoops became associated with the Hawaiian dance, the hula. I imagine the association stuck because of alliteration, since the hip action is not the same.

 

Evidence that hoops encircled the world.

Evidence that hoops encircled the world.

Two weeks ago I attended a “Hooping for Health” workshop at school. Apparently, hula-hoops are in circulation again among boomers. We spent an hour twirling, whirling, spinning, and learning tricks. I’m a very good hula hooper, if I do say so myself, and obviously I do. I easily walked forward and backward, maintaining the hoop around my middle like a personal equator. Then I learned to spin 360 degrees around inside the spinning hoop. Everyone clapped when I did that, even me.

 

Once the weather warms up, say around August if we’re lucky, I plan to buy a hula-hoop. Anything that makes me feel like a whirled champion is worth its weight in plastic.