The Gap Thing

Luckily all of us today, living today, have more or less figured our times out. We have all been born into either this century or the last one, folded into modern times gradually, with a chance to gear up to what it is all about, acclimatize ourselves, and to exist in it.

But imagine how a 19th century person, or an 18th or 17th or 16th--or any other long past century you want to think of---would feel if suddenly jerked out of his or her time and plopped down in ours—in a horse and buggy in the middle of going home traffic on I-Something Or Other. Talk about terrifying.

And that would be just the start of traumatic disorientation. There are all of the other wonders of modern times waiting to flummox and amaze our time traveler—television with its hundreds of channels, computers, the world wide web, and all of the other unimaginables of the electronic age. I would think even something so commonplace as a refrigerator would give them chills in more ways than one. I imagine the likely emotion, until they were forced to stay and get used to it, would be, “how do I get the hell out of here?”

This would be true of any time traveler whipped from their century suddenly into some distant future one. But I doubt if the shock of change was ever as abrupt and disorienting as it would be now coming from any other past distant century suddenly into this one. The changes have just been so rapid, revolutionary, and astounding. And it is bound to get worse at the rate progress is progressing. The most far-fetched landscape of the most far-out science fiction depiction of the world or worlds of tomorrow may not be so far fetched as we now think they are.

Even though I have lived through much of the past century and into the early years of this one, I have a hard time adjusting to the speed of change. There are times I empathize with something Orlando said in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, that I am “not for the fashion of these times.”

Besides, there is the generational gap thing. It is a gap that is demonstrated no more vividly for me than in the comparative reflex action I have and somebody far younger than I has when confronted with the need for information. When I need to know something I don’t know—too often the case--my first impulse is to go to a library to get it. The first impulse of my many-years-junior is to get up on the internet and find it, while perhaps wondering what this “library” thing the old man is talking about has to do with information.

Oh, well, I can’t rightly feel superior about it all. The youngster will probably have the answer before I can get into the car and to the library. Such are the times we live in.