Changes . . .

Changes . . .
March 10, 2000

I had an email question last month from an FR (faithful reader) who ended her message with, "Looking forward to Ye Wise Olde Crone's answer."

The question was -- do I have any answers to some of the serious social problems that I write about? I'm sorry, but after nearly 86 years of knocking around in this world, this Wise Olde Crone has lots of theories, but no firm answers.

I have tried to turn my personal clock back to my youth to see what has changed. In High School in the late twenties liquor was illegal, there were no drugs, no automobiles for kids (we went to the Prom on the streetcar), no television and no free sex. I'm sure our libidos were the same as those of kids today, but we were still operating under Queen Victoria's rules, and our parents strictly enforced them. What that means is simply that it was a lot harder to get in trouble. It doesn't mean that nobody did. In college during prohibition the very few students who drank had to do it in secret and there were no drugs or coed dorms. In fact, there weren't any dorms at all in Boulder then. In four years of living in a sorority house, there was only one "sister" who got married a lot sooner than she intended. For the record, she and her husband celebrated their 50th anniversary.

In this century a lot of things have happened to change the cultural climate. Just a few are scientific research, the technological revolution, the power of television, worldwide instant communication, the huge availability of illegal drugs, the pill, and the Vietnam War with the social rebellion that was long overdue but went too far.

So, like it or not, I live in a different world than I did when I was 20. But for all the changes, the goals are about what they were then. How do we maintain a civilized society in which we respect each other, protect our children, and maintain our individual freedoms?

I think a lot of our worst problems came together last week in one event, the shooting of a first grader in Michigan by her six year old classmate. That little boy had faced, in only six years, almost every problem we face today as a society. His father was in jail, his mother had been evicted from her house, and had passed him off to her brother who reportedly runs a crack house. The little boy slept on the floor on a blanket and was surrounded, at age 6, by people coming and going at all hours buying and selling drugs. He found a loaded pistol lying on the floor and picked it up and stuck it in his pants. Why not? Reportedly he was a bully on the playground and the school failed to realize how serious his situation was. Where does the fault lie? I think with all of us. John Donne said it in a different generation. "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a part of the continent, a part of the main. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." And the little dead girl and her parents paid the price.

Lack of personal responsibility, child abuse, complete easy accessibility to guns for everyone including children, easy availability of every kind of illegal drug, public schools overloaded with educational and non-educational responsibilities -- those, faithful reader, are a few of the problems of our society. And no, I don't know the answers, although I 'd sure like to be Queen of Something so I could try to do something about them.

I do believe that it is the responsibility of each of us to be an activist in whatever area we choose in whatever way we can. You know the phrase; "if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem."

Maybe Ye Wise Olde Crone needs to go into the future and take a lesson from Douglas Adams in "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Universe." "The Answer to the Great Question Of . . . Life, the Universe and Everything . . . . Is . . . . Forty-two."

p.s. Be sure to vote today. That's one answer.