The Second-Greatest Generation

By Lisa

I give my generation a lot of credit.

Somebody has to.

Why do I think credit is in order, in addition to my general mode of goodwill and self-congratulation?

Because I’ve been thinking about the enormous changes my generation has seen in its lifetime, and despite the fact that people generally don’t like change, we’ve done remarkably well with it.

Take the changes in technology alone.

They say you should count your blessings, and I do. So let’s take a moment to count our digital blessings.

On our digits.

For example, my generation will remember that televisions were black-and-white and had only four channels.

That happened.

We know.

We were there.

We remember the first time somebody on the street got a color television, which was invariably in somebody else’s house. On my street, we actually stood outside their house, looking inside their picture window at the marvelous colors flickering on their faces in the darkness.

Okay, now flash forward to today.

When the TV has forty thousand channels, of course in color, plus movies and the like, and despite what people whine about, there’s usually something pretty terrific on somewhere—and if you decide you have to go to the bathroom during the best part, you can stop the television.

Can you believe that?

Can you believe that you can actually stop the television?

I still don’t even understand that.

I just take for granted that the planet has a rotational path as well as a gravitational pull, and so the very idea that I can alter, stop, or even reverse the forces of nature blows my tiny little mind.

Not only that, but I remember the TV days of yore, when you actually had to make a point of being in front of the television when the show came on.

Because the shows were on only at certain times.

And everybody had to watch the show at the same time.

We didn’t determine the time the show was on, the networks did, and we built our lives around the show.

At least The Flying Scottolines did.

If you didn’t, you would “miss the show.”

What?

Nowadays, you never have to miss the show. You can watch the show whenever you want to. You can watch it over and over again.

Incredible!

All you have to do is learn how to work your remote.

We may not be The Greatest Generation, but at least we figured that out.

We’re smarter than our remote controls.

Even if we didn’t live through the Depression.

Call us the Second-Greatest Generation.

Take that, Tom Brokaw.

Let’s not dwell on the fact that as cool as it was to tape TV shows, we never could figure out how to program our VCRs.

It doesn’t matter. In the end, the VCRs died and we’re still here.

Suck it, VCRs.

Payback’s a bitch.

And then there are computers, which are remarkable in every way, and without which I couldn’t do my job. I’m constantly writing and editing, and I can do that with the click of a mouse, instead of the old days, when I remember cutting and pasting.

Do you remember having to type on a sheet, and then when you wanted to edit, physically getting a scissors, taping the line over the previous line, and Xeroxing it?

Or using Wite-out?

Which couldn’t even spell its own name?

And there was something called carbon paper?

What the hell were we thinking?

And now the computers are so little we can hold them in our back pocket, and just the other day when I was walking the dogs, I was able to listen to one of two thousand songs, without even carrying a transistor radio.

Do you remember transistor radios?

And Walkman?

And Discman, which showed you were superwealthy because you had something called compact discs?

Shiny!

But now we have phones, which not only play music but take our picture, make movies of our lives, and even, remarkably, let us talk to one another whenever we want to, wherever we want to.

I know this sounds like Captain Obvious, but really, isn’t that incredible?

By the way, you’ll always sound like Captain Obvious when you count your blessings.

Care not.

Count anyway.

Meanwhile, while we’re on the subject of phones, do you remember when you had to hang around the house, unable to go anywhere, waiting for a call from a doctor, or your mother, or your new crush?

That was then, this is better.

And paradoxically, sometimes the new technology is the old technology.

For example, the other day I was looking at my phone and discovered that it has a compass inside.

Well, not inside.

God knows where the compass is.

The same place the phone is.

The phone and the compass and the TV and the camera and the record player are the same thing.

And all I can tell you is that after I discovered that my phone was also a compass, I spent a good part of the afternoon walking northwest across my kitchen and trying to orient myself in the cosmos.

Until I realized that the cosmos was in my very hand.

It’s the greatest.

And so are we.