Saturday, November 28, 2009

A Happy Thanksgiving.....without the Internet


Thanksgiving has come and gone for another year. It is always seems easy to me to point out everything that is wrong and gripe about it. I hope that everybody took a few minutes to reflect on the many things that people who happen to live in America take for granted and are a true blessing. (Insert what you are thankful for here.)

I traveled to Cape May Point New Jersey for Thanksgiving dinner, at the family beach house. It was a wonderful get together, made even more wonderful by the fact that the Internet was not working. How can this be, no Internet in America?Usually we have no problem with our wireless down there, but this time you no sooner got a connection than it failed.

I want to see Bill Curtis shoot his next "I just found the Internet" commercial there. We could find it, it just kept going into hiding. With Satellite transmissions being blocked by the aliens, it was a good thing that the cable TV still comes in the old fashioned way, by line on a telephone wire. Can you imagine if we would have had no TV? No Football?

I dare not to envision it.

These circumstances made for a nice Thanksgiving gathering, because no one could sneak away and bury themselves in their own little Internet world, reading email, browsing Facebook, or commenting on blogs.Instead we talked to each other face to face.

The women folk actually piled in the car and went shopping at Kmart after dinner. They couldn't go online in private, so they went out as a group. Later that night the family sat around the kitchen table playing board games, with much laughter involved.

There is something to be said about those rare family moments of shared experience. They are becoming few and far between. Those are the memories worth making, and that is another area where Americans are trailing the cultures of other parts of the world.

Technology has changed American culture in many ways, and not always for the better, because it has allowed us to become impersonal. We are more connected to others than ever, yet we are as distant than we have ever been.Thursday I caught a glimpse of a not so recent past that we are forgetting. I hope I get to see it again soon. I kind of liked it.

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