2001 Soap Box Archives

Changing Times

For someone who never even watched television until I was fifteen years old, who learned to drive on a stick shift transmission, who used a crosscut saw and a horse drawn plow, who remembers when a computer took up the biggest part of a couple of good sized rooms, who has seen the advent of the ball point pen, the jet airplane and hundreds of other mind blowing things, I must say that it still amazes me when I use a cell phone or watch television rolling down the road via a roving satellite dish. There’s just no keeping up, technology changes so fast that by the time I get a halfway grasp on something, it is replaced by something newer, faster and much more complicated, for a mind that has dealt in words and notes for the biggest part of it’s existence. I guess what I’m trying to say is that insofar as technology is concerned I feel like a dummy. For instance, I’ve been wanting a mp3 player and the other day I was in New York City and I figured that would be a dandy place to find one, and I was right. I found plenty of them and bought two. When I got back home Little Charlie came up to show me how to use them and much to my chagrin said something like, "Dad these are made to be compatible with IBM type hardware and you’ve got Apple.’’ So here I am with several hundred dollars worth of electronics which I purchased in New York that ain’t worth a hill of beans as far as my equipment is concerned. It seems that I’m constantly making those kind of mistakes. I just have a hard time thinking in terms of what software is compatible with what hardware and so forth. Little Charlie, who is my computer guru, can show me something time after time and it seems that I keep making the same mistakes over and over. I guess it has something to do with old dogs and new tricks. So much has changed in my lifetime that it’s hard to grasp, and for someone who was born in the first half of the twentieth century it’s downright mind boggling. I remember rotary dial telephones, ice boxes that worked with real ice, and doctors who made house calls. I even remember the days in rural North Carolina when whole segments of the country were without electricity, which meant no washing machines and battery radios. Don’t get me wrong, I have no desire to return to the days of oil lamps and outdoor sanitary facilities. No sir, I’m as attached to indoor plumbing as the next man. And I love having the football games come right into my living room. It’s just that I feel about technology much like I feel about my golf swing. I ain’t ever going to be no Tiger Woods, so I’d just best enjoy the game and not get upset when I hit a bad shot, which seems to be about every other one. Conversely I’m never going to be a computer whiz, I’ll never be able to set the time on my VCR or program the numbers in my cell phone, and I’ve just given up on trying to figure out how satellites work. I’m just going to take my little laptop computer, my remote control and go on about my life content in the fact that I’m probably not the only dummy in the world. After all, I may be out of touch with technology but I’m still rockin’ and rollin’.

What do you think?

God Bless America
Charlie Daniels