Henrietta Hay's Column

A friend and I were talking the other day over coffee. She is of my generation and complained that the world is moving too fast. There are too many changes and nothing is the way it used to be. We aren't ready for all of them. That's all too true. That's what happens when human beings have brains and free will. They keep on using them-- now and then. There is no doubt that science has moved faster than our ethical ability to handle it and that society has undergone major changes, but personally, I prefer modern plumbing to an exotic English castle.

We didn't invent change in the 20th century. Heraclitus, back in 500 B. C. commented that, "Nothing endures but change."

Public television's Nova recently aired a wonderful program about the Grand Canyon. The story told by the rock in the canyon took 5.7 billion years to "write." The earth rose and fell. Tiny cuts were made by water and grew into great canyons. Occasionally huge debris flows completely dammed the river for a million or so years and the water cut through again. Each time the character of the canyon changed. In the tiny blip of time during which the Glen Canyon Dam has taken away the spring floods, the entire ecosystem of the canyon has changed once again. The birds, plants, fish the sand bars are different. During the first several billion years nature made its changes. Now man has taken his turn to try to control it. In another blip that dam will be washed away and nature will take over again.

It may be another million years before somebody knows whether or not we are destroying our planet in the 20th Century. Maybe Captain Picard on Star Trek will figure it out.

The rate of change has speeded up since the dawn of recorded history. It took the wheel nearly 5000 years to get the attention it deserved. The airplane has done it in less than 100.

Last week I got up at 6:00 a.m. to watch the first passenger plane land at Denver International Airport. I think I'll stay out of the argument over DIA's feasibility, but they say it is designed for changes in aviation, and will serve Denver well into the 21st century. I hope so. It will take them all century to pay for it.

My dad started with the horse and buggy and flew in a jet in his eighties. I bounced around in one of the very early automobiles, and have seen close-up pictures of Mars, and an American and a Soviet ship come within 39 feet of each other out in space. I can't even imagine what my grandchildren will see when they are eighty.

Even the political conservatives have learned about change. All these years they have been saying that we must "conserve" things the way they have always been. Now they are yelling "Change -- change something, change anything, just change."

All too slowly change is coming about for the status of women. We have had the vote only since 1920, and we have worked our way up to 49 women in the House of Representatives and four in the Senate. The Glass Ceiling is barely cracked. Oh well, it has only been 74 years. Change is slow.

I recently read a book about a young woman of mixed Eskimo/Danish blood. She was torn between the two parts of her heritage. She was comfortable and happy with her native lifestyle, but she went away to the University and learned modern ways, wore good clothes and also liked her life there. She asked an old woman in her village, "Which is better?" "Now is better," said the old woman. "Not so many people die of starvation."

I too think now is better. Of course, we don't have much choice. It is now already. We can sit around and yearn for the good old days of yore or we can try to slow down the kind of changes we don't like and speed up the ones we do. We all handle change differently. When I am tired, I want it to go away. But mostly I am curious to know what is coming next.

Edmund Spenser said it in the Fairie Queen "The ever-whirling wheel / Of Change; the which all mortal things doth sway."