Seems That Time Has Passed Me By
Yesterday my BlackBerry mysteriously lost its Internet service, and between the time it went down and the time my service was restored, I was tense, irritated, sweaty under the arms, and upset with RIM – an outfit that prides itself in its technological expertise. When I finally got to talk to a real person about the problem and found out that virtually every BlackBerry in the world had lost its Internet connectivity during the last two or three days, but that the problem was a three-minute fix and not an invasive radical attack by Chinese, Russian, or our own techno-terrorists, I breathed a little easier. In three minutes – not counting the inevitable numerous phone calls, listening to multiple recorded directories, and being on hold for an interminable time with my speaker-phone on – I was back online taking care of email, research, and other "pressing" duties and obligations. Reflecting later, I began to wonder why I live my life this way when it is entirely unnecessary. Nothing is worth the siege of rising high blood pressure that comes with an unexpected breakdown in the neo-information age when everything seems to need to be done instantly – almost before its conception. Fleetingly, I thought of rabbits breeding.
For several years in the 1990's and early 2000's I operated an Internet services and network-based technical and information services company. Before I went to prison I was pretty much on top of the latest technology in that business environment; three years later, when I got out of prison, my knowledge of the business was as obsolete as my equipment. No wonder I'm reclusive, a bit grumpy, and resigned to being simply a techno-user rather than a techno-innovator. But still, it offends my intuitive nature that I rely so much on this stuff.
During my life-time I've seen the technological world grow from statical radio and snowy television to cable and satellite digital television and FM radio, from firewood and coal to REA electricity in rural areas, from huge main-frame adding machines called computers to real computers that are held in the palm of your hand, from magnetic compasses and USGS topo maps to triangulated satellite GPS, from lovely hard-backed books to impersonal wireless electronic Kindles. Oh, it goes on and on, and it will go on and on, no doubt exponentially, into the unforeseeable future. If I was 40 years younger, I'd be thrilled at the near-miraculous prospects of it all. But I just don't give a damn anymore; I've seen enough of it, and I'm not amazed by any of it like I once was.
These days I find myself longing for Model-T Fords, horses and buggies, Christmastime hayrides, candlelight and kerosene lanterns, wood stoves and real rock fireplaces, well-water hand-pumped on icy mornings, and outhouses with a half-moon on the rickety plank door. I remember taking my baths in a wash-tub beside the kitchen wood-stove at my grandparents' ranch house on Gooseberry Creek in rural Wyoming. I remember gathering the eggs every morning from the chicken coop, watching out for rattlesnakes, skunks, and other critters who wanted them too; and I remember helping harvest a few of the hens from those same chicken coops for Sunday afternoon dinners. I remember my grandfather refusing to drive more than 30 miles an hour on the highway into town in his brand new '48 Ford, though the speed limit was 65, because his old Model A wouldn't go any faster than that – and that was fast enough. It seemed to take a lifetime for me, a seven-year-old, to cover the ten miles of dirt road followed by the ten miles of asphalt highway.
Nowadays, I yearn for wooden ball parks, and frame buildings three stories tall at the tallest, dirt streets with no names and no sidewalks, residences with no house numbers, gas stations with just one or two pumps, one sheriff, and no fire stations. I wish laws were plain and simple again, and I wish people were neighborly and trusting like they once were not so long ago.
I've warm memories of handmade ledgers, of columnar pads, and itemized handwritten grocery store receipts. There were slide rules and mechanical adding machines and unpowered cash registers. There were no seat belts in cars and trucks, and no child safety seats, and no turn signals. I used to ride standing on the running board of my father's pickup, or in the open bed with my siblings and our dogs, when we went to the mountains to "get away from it all." I miss playing along the railroad tracks, and wandering happily in the vacant and roadless hills not far out of town, sometimes horseback, sometimes afoot. I miss playing football in the street in front of our house where nary an automobile came by for hours.
There was a time when human souls had empathy for one other – when we, as individuals, or even public law enforcement, actually took the time and had the compassion to help someone who'd run into misfortune or just plain screwed up without displaying ruthless or overreaching exercise of abusive power, superiority, or self-righteous indignation or vindication. Though the law was the law, the rules of enforcement were not written in stone, and common sense and circumstantial mitigation were often exercised right at an incident. In today's world individual or collective compassion for the plight of others is all but forgotten. Thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty years ago it was often first and foremost. A person had to screw up really badly – and often more than once – not to be given a "second" chance before his life was ruined by long years in prison.
Maybe a lot of all the hubris and anger in people today is caused by overcrowding – too many of us too close together in urban areas – or maybe it's just that there are too many of us to get along together, period. Maybe there's too much competition for comfortable survival in the human world these days. Middle class Dads and Moms didn't always have to work two jobs or more to get along financially, and if a woman didn't choose to work, the family often got along okay with only a single breadwinner. Those women who chose to do so could stay home and be a housewife and raise the kids in a meaningful way. Family life, even if a family is close-knit these days, was different then. It was built around an opportunity to spend a lot of quality time together then – something that is absolutely foreign or impossible to most families these days. Today the diversions are endless, and in most cases, divisive so far as family unity is concerned; technology, particularly entertainment technology, is a big part of the problem.
If I hadn't gone to prison, I might not have realized that time has passed me by; and so, for the first time in my life, I have to give some credit to George W. Bush – in my humble opinion the worst leader this country has ever known – and his prophetic words, who inanely said, "America is the land of the second chance - and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life." In my own case, I believe he was right, but what about the real world? Here are some pretty grim recidivism numbers about the effectiveness of our judicial and penal systems:
Though the above data is old, there is evidence that the numbers have remained about the same or have gotten worse, but one can plainly see the increased rate of recidivism in every offender area.
In Nevada, where I was imprisoned, here is the latest estimate from the Nevada Department of Corrections' own statistics: Nevada estimates nearly 70 percent of offenders will return to prison within three years of release.
Study after study, research project after research project, has shown that our criminal justice and correctional systems just don't work. I believe it's primarily due to the effect of forcing criminals to live with criminals – particularly in the case of non-violent crimes – where peer-pressure influences come to bear on convicted felons who are more or less forced by society and the contacts they make in prison to return to their old lifestyles when they are released. Today, for the first time in our nation's history, more than 1 in every 100 adults, male and female, in this country is in prison, the highest rate of incarceration of all the world's developed nations.
This essay is not meant to be about the failures of America's judicial and penal systems – though the problem sorely needs to be addressed by more objective minds – but my point is that when I was a young man growing up, making the difficult transition from puberty to adulthood, and out into the workplace, a good many of us who made non-violent transgressions in those more compassionate times really were given a second chance then, rather than arbitrarily sentenced to a demeaning life behind bars.
In my own case, three years in prison, albeit late in my life, brought a new and different sense of values, morality, and lifestyle to me – not at all because of the criminal justice or correctional systems, but in spite of them, because of a divine, spiritually conscious, transition from the person I was then to the one I am now – a transition that I sincerely doubt would ever have occurred otherwise.
And I would never have known this peaceful easy feeling that time has passed me by, and how pleased I am in my heart about that. I can live with today's world by longing for those good old days, which gives me pause to know that there are better days ahead for my own soul and for yours.
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