My Father's Journal: "Snapshots"

(JKM's Note: As some of you are aware, my 80-year old father, Ken Muir, has entered a new phase in his long battle with cancer. Last summer, he began to maintain a journal of his thoughts during these days,  and I wanted to share them with readers while he is still with us.  Why? He is a teacher to me, and my family, and he mentored a generation of students at Mountain Lakes High School through the 1970's and 1980s.  To many, he is still a mentor.

This is the first of a series, and my father has titled his journal "Reflections and Observations as Night Draws Nigh")

He begins the journal with a preface called "Ice Floe," in which he writes the following:

"Do not judge me by anything that I now write or fail to write. Judge me, rather, by what I have been and done o'er the long years before now. See the record, not today's man. For today, I am just a panicky old man perched on an ice floe, watching the outer edges rapidly melt away and fall."

With that introduction, I include now a piece from my father about the change he has witnessed over his 80 years on this Earth.

 Snapshots

By Ken Muir

A century ago, the majority of Americans still lived on farms. When I was born in 1943, a quick generation later, much of that America still existed; unpainted clapboard homes, barns, outdoor privies, free-standing wooden structures for tractors or automobiles. Perched on scraggly or non-existent lawns and surrounded by unkempt fences, America's homes, many of them still rural, mirrored the struggle for survival known as The Great Depression.

Burma Shave signs littered the rural byways. Packard, Nash, Studebaker, Hudson, Pontiac, Mercury, Plymouth, DeSoto, Kaiser, and Oldsmobile still produced new cars every year for Americans. 99.5% of the cars on the market were American-made. Whoever heard of a Japanese automobile? The only chain of restaurants and hotels in the country was Howard Johnsons. No one had ever heard of "fast food" restaurants.

The country's population stood at 130 million.

Fast forward now to the snapshot of America today. Fewer than 2% of Americans live on farms. Teeming suburbs and cities house most of our population of 300 million people, and unbelievable wealth in the form of luxury automobiles and large, well-appointed homes is all around us. A typical middle class home today costs 20 to 30 times as much as it cost during that a first decade after WWII.

Building on its overwhelming global victory in World War II, America has advanced to levels of material prosperity unparalleled in human history. Levels of affluence and comfort that were only fanciful dreams in 1950 have now become everyday expectations. A college education, a prize within the reach of only a few Americans before the Second World War, has now become so commonplace as to be discounted in importance by increasing numbers of misguided citizens. Computational power available only by filling an entire large room with the early ENIAC and UNIVAC computers is now dwarfed by the computing power held in a person's hand.

Technology now, almost entirely digital, calls almost all the tunes in today's America. It facilitates most all aspects of our lives and in many realms of life it literally dictate the terms. Go anywhere, indoors or out, and observe a citizenry so intent on their phones that they are oblivious to the natural and social worlds around them.

I have no idea where all this leads.

I do know that much has been lost along with these technological and material gains. The face to face interaction, the human contact which digital communication and information dissemination diminish or eliminate, is a growing and vital loss. (As a person dying from cancer, I learn anew each week the delights, the rewards that come from decent people reaching out in face-to-face contact to let me know they care about me. They do not say it in so many words, they show it by their behavior.)

And almost as important, the pell-mell movement away from intimate personal contact with our physical world has accelerated. As one who loves the out-of-doors, who is spiritually liberated by a day in the woods, I know the value of this part of being human. And we are losing it rapidly. 

These are starting and ending snapshots for me, the America I arrived in and the America I depart from. What a rapidly changing reality! Best wishes to all of you as you continue to confront it and shape it for your existence.