The irony of this shift is that it is not, at its heart, ill-intended. I think people want ease of living and ease of thinking. It is indeed the ease of economics to move all the stores from Main Street inside the controlled environment of a mall, or to ease them out altogether with a more economical super-department store. It is the ease of economics that builds all the homes at once from the same template and calls it, ironically, a development. It makes more homes available to many. It is even the ease of economics to eat prefabricated food at restaurant chains.
But ease comes at a cost, in my personal view, both individually and collectively as a culture. We can shop at the same stores and eat at the same restaurants. We can wear the same logos on our shirts and jeans.
As we submit to the synthetic, to the artificial, and to the prepackaged experience, I fear we are surrendering the chance to live authentically. And this is where I must, as a father, raise the flag of worry. I am reminded of an area near the house in which I lived in West Hartford, when I was ten. It consisted of a series of empty lots that were never developed and left to overgrow. These several acres of bushes and trees were known by all as the Bumps. Every child in the neighborhood lived at the Bumps. Home was only where you went to eat and sleep. Almost every important moment of my life happened there that year. It was more than where I played,. It was where I met my best friends, where I learned how to hide, where I got hurt, where I guilt a fort, where I learned to fight and where I learned to negotiate. The Bumps was a discarded place, but an authentic place because on any given day it could become anything or anyplace, whatever our imaginations demanded. How ironic that a site so neglected and so common supported so much life.
In today's erosion of the authentic, places like the Bumps have become forgotten fields. Sadly, from what I have witnessed, they no longer seem necessary. They have been replaced, by not homes, but in my opinion, by video-game--- which buffer youngsters from any need for human contact, from any use of imagination and render an authentic moment all but impossible. The dungeons we created in the Bumps and the dragons we imagined were far more authentic than those on a video screen. I am reminded of the Bumps when I remember that while the authentic can be destroyed, it cannot be created.
What we seem to have lost as well are the authentic treasures that come from having hobbies. Hobbies connect young people to the authentic; they are a way for them to embrace it with the odd collections of stamps, and coins and model airplanes. Along with baseball cards, rocks and tropical fish they are nothing but odd trinkets in themselves, but when carefully assembled or gathered together in the hands of a child they come alive as if by magic.....
