Losing The Basics

When speaking with my 93 year old mom-in-law it’s interesting to get her take on all the things throughout the last nearly 100 years that she has seen come and go. Her generation has seen the switch from outhouses to indoor plumbing, carriages to cars, and crank phones to cell phones. Our generation of baby boomers have seen a great number of our own vast improvements in everyday living. Technology in the last few decades has taken off like, well, like a rocket to the moon. What can be disturbing to ponder though is what we’ve seen slowly disappearing, such as the simple act of reading and writing cursive handwriting because of a growing dependency on technology. More and more schools no longer require cursive handwriting to be taught, as they deem it too time consuming for teachers to have to deal with. Sadly, my generation seems to be the ones that will see the demise of several things that we over the years have just taken for granted as fundamental, such as being able to read and write cursive, being able to tell time on a non-digital clock, tie shoelaces, count back change, or even the ability to memorize one’s own phone number and address. They say all great things must come to an end. Sadly, they don’t tell us what great losses we’ll incur because of their passing.