My grandmother was born in 1912, the year that the Titanic sank to its watery grave. Indoor plumbing was for rich people, and telephones were for business users and upscale families. Her parents were immigrants, refugees from the Italian diaspora that befell many of the small villages as subsistence farming died. When my grandmother entered the 2nd grade, only 7% of Americans owned an automobile, and her home got its first electric light when she entered the 8th grade.
We talked about some of this as I sat beside her and watched the men land on the moon in July of 1969, just a few days before her 57th birthday. She told me that there was no way she could describe how much change has happened since she was my age, because too much had come to pass. My grandmother was born at a time when modern technology was in its infancy, so her capacity for absorbing change was limited by a belief system that had only witnessed a simple arc of growth, like a line with a gentle upward slope. To her dying day, she could not figure out how to rewind a VHS cassette, and had great difficulty remembering how to turn on her electric typewriter. The world that formed her had neither the capacity nor the foresight to predict what was coming in the 20th century.
I was born in 1964, the year that The Beatles landed in the US. Jim Crow was still the law of the land. There was no Federal protection for civil rights and women were still considered property – even though we had been given the right to vote when my grandmother was 8 years old. Cars were big, gas-guzzling monstrosities, and we were still 6 years away from the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Rivers were catching on fire, our leaders were being assassinated, bigotry and racism flourished in broad daylight, and the simple act of loving someone who shared the same biological sex as yourself was criminalized. The advanced computer of the day, the third iteration of UNIVAC, weighed in at 12.3 tons, and took up the better part of a 3-story building. On the upside, the music was amazing.
To anyone reading this in 2024, the world of 1964 might seem as archaic to you as the description of my grandmother’s world – and you would be correct. The big difference, besides the obvious advancement in technology, is the rate in which changes are coming. While my Grandmother’s world prepared her only for a gentle slope of change, the world which cemented my framework of understanding was not just faster, but accelerating every day. Today, the rate of change is exponential – even the rate of acceleration is accelerating! Those born after the mid-20th century have a much greater capacity for absorbing, utilizing and dispensing new information, a speed that makes my grandmother look like she’s standing still.
We are made of stern stuff, simultaneously resilient, yet forgiving. In my next post, I’ll talk about how to sink roots and weather the changes that are heading our way…
Beautiful snapshot of the changing times