The Future of Small Towns

Kuah, Langkawi, Malaysia

THE FUTURE OF SMALL TOWNS

           Every day I look out over the small town of Kuah and wonder what the future of this place will be.  The first time I came to this island, I came here and a road along the beach was dirt. I stayed one night in a tiny cottage tucked under palm trees. A friend and I sat on the immaculate white sand beneath a gorgeous full moon. Four years later, the cottage was gone, replaced by a resort, the streets are paved and lined with many small shops and restaurants. Tourism came quickly to the island, peaking several years ago but now diminishing. The character of the place has changed -- as every taxi driver tells me --  it's still very lovely and now there's more places to go and things to see. What will the future bring? Right now, Langkawi is like Hawaii was when I first went there some thirty years ago. Will it too become overrun?

          A small forward-thinking group of citizens from my old hometown have set up a website (see Facebook) to ask, “What is the future of Sharon, Connecticut?” This little town was bustling during the American Revolution with hundreds of small businesses. The manufacturing increased with the iron and coal-mining industries of the 19^th century which polluted the valley air and stripped the hills of their virgin forests. Now all that raucous life has dissipated and the hills and valleys have over the past half-century have reverted to a restful peace and quiet. Only two hours from New York City in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, it still manages to be a 'Shangri-la'. I wonder about its future: how much longer will retain its character before disappearing into the mists like the proverbial 'Brigadoon?' 

              In recent months in Thailand, farmers from small towns in the northeast of the country donned red shirts, loaded their families and friends into pickup trucks, and drove into the city of Bangkok. They set up a camp right in the center of the city and slept on mats in the streets. They held the city hostage for two months, culminating in a battle with the military and police. Whether manipulated by a multimillionaire whose assets were being seized by the present government or not, the spokespersons for the farmers had a point to make: life in small towns and rural farms is difficult. Farmers work long hours but remain poor, some are hungry, homes are without water or electricity, educational opportunities are limited or non-existent. Their prospects for a better life are slim. They do not feel they have sufficient political clout to be able to make a difference using legal channels. Something has to be done – sadly, no 'red shirt' stated clearly what.

              Billions on the planet barely survive in small communities. In every country in the world, including the United States, the situations for poor people living in small towns are extreme. During the Beijing Olympics, China set a goal of supplying a basketball court and badminton tables to every small town in the country -- many communities did not have the barest minimum of facilities. The small town poor usually do not move away from their birthplace despite better opportunities in the big cities; many cannot while others prefer to gather with friends and family in small, tight-knit social groups and live a life with familiar things surrounding them. 

           In a remote village in southern Egypt, I was struck by how well the town functioned despite its evident poverty.  Small gardens grew in the narrow verge between the fertile earth watered by the Nile and the miles of rocky desert beyond. Small wood and cinder block houses lined the dusty road. Painted on the walls of a central building were airplanes and boats, indications of fulfillment of the Muslim mandate to travel to Mecca. Those who had been on the Hajj had become the leaders. The men met almost every day to drink coffee and talk. Those discussions had led to dealing with problems like the need for a car mechanic in the town. They raised funds and sent a bright high school student to a city technical high school for training. There was poverty but there was also cooperation.

               City dwellers may envy small town dwellers the many advantages of life in a small town -- the interdependence of neighbors, the quiet, peace, and proximity to nature. When the population is in balance, agricultural 'peasant' cultures have several thousand years of 'know how' and can provide for small communities and cope with most hardships. In China, millions of factory workers leave their towns for the big cities. They are the brave ones or the restless ones who do not want to spend their days on the farms struggling against weather, insects, plant diseases, wild animals, etc. When the factories close, many retreat to their old homes. Can you really ever go home again?

                When I think of “home,” I think of the lovely small town (Sharon, Connecticut) in New England where my parents found a ‘white elephant’ of a house. It is not where I was born but where I lived off and on for most of 31 years. It is very near where my parents first met as camp counselors at a summer camp (Camp Sloane). My father traveled a lot as an archaeologist and he moved the family several times across the country during my childhood. His was a synthetic mind – he could bring together disparate elements from all parts of the globe and formulate new and often quite original conclusions. Twenty years after they met, having moved across country to Seattle and back, 'fate' brought my parents back full circle and a house became available in the town near where they met. His conclusion: this is where he wanted to stay for the rest of his life as the little town was the most beautiful place on earth.

                Tucked into the “foothills of the Berkshires,” in several isolated valleys surrounded by rolling hills, a large town green stretches for several blocks along the main street, a small hill at one end where the elementary school is the major landmark, then another valley where small shops surround a large parkinglot. The town sits at the base of an ancient mountain covered in miles of forest. Historic homes and churches in Revolutionary Georgian and various Victorian era styles line the streets. Small groups of houses can be found on backcountry lanes spreading out for miles.

          Sharon has one of the largest land areas in the state and one of the smallest populations. The town itself is surrounded by forested mountains. Graves and statues demonstrate more than two hundred and fifty years have passed by here – a long era for an American town --  the essence of the town lightly shaped by the lives and deaths of its citizens. Soldiers went off to all of America's wars and came back home to be buried. Lovers met and parted. Families joined, grew, parted, died.

          It is an unusual community in some ways. Only about 2,000 souls live there year-round – swelling to perhaps 5,000 in the summer -- yet every person I ever met there had a fascinating life story. Celebrities have found it.  Noah Webster wrote his "Blueback Speller" (before his Webster's Dictionary) in the loft of the house now owned by designer Caroline Roehm. This is the town where in revolutionary times, a factory promoted that it could "build a better mousetrap."  For some 200 years, there has been a grocery, hardware, liquor store, post office, clothing shop, a hotel, as well as since the 1950's, a hospital and a summer stock theater.

                In the thirty-one years that I came and went from that little town, there were few visible changes. When I went back for the first time after five years away, people said to me, “How the town has changed! Go on up on the mountain and see how many new houses have been built.” To me, it looked pretty much the same but then I took a meandering drive through old dirt country roads and saw what they meant. Side roads lead through the trees to new houses perched on rocky outcroppings for the view or tucked into the forest next to musical streams.

               These were not cheap houses; the rich had discovered the little town and celebrities made it their weekend hideaway. Famous faces appeared in the grocery store and local restaurants. As I was writing a check one day and waiting for a manager’s approval, a man next to me was doing the same thing. I happened to glance at the name – unbelievably it was the same as a famous movie star’s. I looked up and saw indeed it was him. He too was living a local person’s life – waiting for the manager to approve his check. (Nowadays of course banking is more sophisticated and grocery stores issue ID cards).

                In following years, I tried on and off to establish a working life in that small town. It soon became clear that the world there was dividing rapidly. There were the wealthy who could afford apartments in New York City as well as Connecticut country homes. The rich were divided into the wealthy residents with long-time roots and the “nouveau riche” who had made a ‘killing in the stock market’ or ‘a good investment in utilities.’ They had moved into historic homes dating to the American Revolution thereby took on the status of those with “Old Money,” the sons and daughters of the Revolution, those select few eligible for the “Social Register.” Acceptance required real wealth; old-timers claimed it took thirty years residence to become a 'local.'

              Then there were the rest of us whose bank accounts were not as flush -- some with pedigrees, some whose families had lived there for centuries, some with no such claim-to-fame who by reasons of relatives living there or other circumstances ended up living in this small town.  The children of the rich commuted to one of the several excellent private schools based in the area; the rest of us were called "townies" because we attended the local elementary school and met up with other ‘small town kids’ who traveled for an hour daily on a bus to the regional high school.

                As a sociological experiment, there was much to observe in the dynamics that had endured for two centuries in this small place (a sociologist could have ‘a field day’ as town records have preserved much of the comings and goings of this small population). Identity and self-worth, for me and others who grew up there became a deep issue. Were we destined to be “servants of the rich?” Were our small businesses and creative projects “services to the community” or merely entertainment and suppliers for the wealthy? To be really poor in that small town meant you were unwilling or incapable of doing the jobs offered by the rich.

To work and earn sufficient money to survive, you would have to garden, clean, pump gas, clerk, or massage the rich, or else design a business that could overcome the obstacles of distance, weather, the lack of skilled workers or supplies.  As a member of a local Chamber of Commerce, I heard stories of businesses that lasted because they got into mailorder and found customers outside this rural area. Like so many in tourist-based communities all over the world, many people simply cut their expenses in the off-season and worked overtime during the peak months.

Looking back, the fortunes of the town can be traced following the swings of the national economy.  When the rich were doing well, the town enlarged, enlivened, enhanced everyone’s lives. There were arts classes and theatre in the summertime, weekenders passed through to see the brilliant foliage in the fall, families and friends cozied up to woodstoves and fireplaces in the long winters of deep snow, gardeners reveled in the first white and yellow spring flowers – snowdrops, daffodils, the joyful splash of forsythia bushes. In times of ‘economic downturn,’ businesses closed and young people moved away, but for many who could not or did not wish to leave, they followed traditional New England fashion, turned stony-faced, stopped buying groceries -- causing the grocery store to close --  and endured.

                What is the future of small towns? The benefits are many: the quiet life, the support of close friends and family, the open spaces. For those that have attractions, tourism can bring outside money into town but there are always losses when a town commits to commercialization  – loss of privacy, loss of the essential orderliness and familiarity in a place where everyone knows each other, even loss of dignity as the golden arches and neon signs move in.

               There is a completeness and circularity in a small town. People fill the niches, suppliers and supplied, merchant and customer, grower and consumer. Like the forests that surround my New England town, the on-going life is cyclical:  families and friends coming together and growing apart, births and deaths, and a life that has its moments of noise and also of silence.  Perhaps it is the intimacy and that silence that makes small towns so often more appealing than city life.  In the city, the cycles are subsumed to the linearity of getting things done, going to work and coming home to an apartment where others’ lives impinge through the walls. In the country, greater space underlies a difference in the meaning of social relationships: people get together because they need each other for mutual support.

                The farmer who raises dairy cows in the Berkshire Hills and the Thai farmer who plants paddy rice share in common a life of hard work and low income. What of those who aspire to something different – to run their own business or to become a teacher, artist, dancer, scientist, engineer, scholar, a shaman? What of those who wish to participate in the governing of their community or the sustainability of the planet? Will they live lives of “quiet desperation” or find  ways to ease their restlessness? What of those who lack ambition or resist new ideas because conditions or traditions have such a strong hold on their consciousness?

                  Education seem to offer some hope. But questions arise as to which communities will receive the funding for schools, teachers, libraries and other educational resources. If a town can generate funds from a site or feature that will attract tourists or has some special resource to be mined, it will be able to provide better opportunities for its citizens. Governments will take notice and add more funds. Success breeds success but is the community more worthy than any other?

                  It is possible to assemble a banquet of ideas to solve issues for towns. Those with knowledge have a responsibility to become mentors and share it with those who do not have access. Communities that honor their elders seem to be able to sustain themselves, perhaps longer than others that do not. The internet and the world wide web also offer hope. With basic training, a computer, and internet connections, it is possible to find out how others live in almost any community in the world.

                   The question is which choices will sustain a community or an individual for a lifetime and beyond? The elders may teach the traditions, but the 21st Century makes new demands. Do small town leaders have the education, experience, and wisdom to make the hard choices, for example, whether or not to promote tourism or to let mining scar the hillsides? Do leaders have the maturity to choose long-term sustainability over short-term solutions to immediate problems? Clearly, as ruined landscapes stand witness in millions of small towns, the wrong decisions have been made too often. 

                The past century was marked by countries overthrowing colonial powers. In the U.S., small towns have become subsumed to county, state, and federal governments. This top-heavy structure limits small town freedom. Yet should a small community always accept the leadership of the state? If the state dictates a dam should be built or a mine dug or timber cut, should the locals just surrender? Should we just do what we are told? For some of us – and I count myself as one of those eccentrics --  life circumstances or an inner voice tells us this is not enough, or that others' choices may not coincide with our own values. 

                What training in the thought processes, critical thinking skills, or specific sets of knowledge is needed to make the right choices on any issue? For the individual living in a small town, they must weigh the benefits of rural life.  The primary consideration is often what resources are available and what must be sacrificed. Are there sufficient resources to meet basic survival needs, to handle the inevitable cycles of feast and famine, to facilitate any needed or wished for change. Wisdom teaches, “The only thing that does not change is change.”

                 The obvious answer for all small towns is that they must have the ‘income streams’ that bring in and circulate the funds and assets to sustain the community. This could come from tourism, manufacturing, real estate, investments – there are many ways to generate income. Each one has its merits and drawbacks.

                In the Kingdom of Thailand, the King himself has offered the country a plan -- and a set of values -- he has called “the self-sufficiency economy” whereby each community attempts to be independent in itself and supply its own needs. Clearly, the ‘red shirts’ need help to overcome a variety of obstacles if they are ever to achieve this lofty goal. The difficulty is that it requires 'start-up' resources that a government – or a multimillionaire – can provide. The 'red shirts' argue that the 'yellow shirts' in Bangkok are ignoring their needs. "Self-sufficiency" is a consciousness-raising idea and does spur action.  With the aid of mentors, rural communities in Thailand are successfully figuring out how to share water, stop landslides, find alternatives to slash-and-burn farming techniques, build industries with trained workers, often around a traditional art or craft, and feed their populations.

            In the last few decades, Chinese communism with its tight registry and supervision has accomplished miracles in distributing food and work, though the smallest communities may 'fall through the cracks.' Thai culture has strong traditions rooted in a clear hierarchy and close-knit families. Youth and those of lower classes are taught in childhood at home and in school to be obedient to those who are ranked higher on the social scale. American culture, on the other hand, prizes "rugged individualism.' For the ‘picture postcard’ New England town where I lived for so many years, the options are wide but the obstacles are great, mainly due to the range of personalities that make up the town. Despite the old “New England Town Meeting” tradition, it is hard to get the community to agree on a sustainable direction.

A Connecticut policewoman complained to me that cell tower communications were hit-or-miss locally because wealthy landowners did not wish to have a cell tower built in their sightlines. Years ago, one group in Sharon proposed the building of a condominium; another group organized a parade of children carrying signs opposing it. One group saw the future of the town hospital in bringing in an outside national management firm, another perceived that as ‘selling out’ and mourned the loss of a local stake in its governance. A history of the summer stock theater established in the 1950’s would show how various factions shaped the summer theater offerings – some years with “outside professionals” who walked away at season’s end, leaving huge debts, other years with local groups struggling to sustain it, still others when it became an important center for the community to come together, offering youth training and quality ‘ community theater’ with talented people whose busy lives allowed them only time to appear onstage once or a few times a year.  The town encompasses relatively poor and extremely rich in a broad set of social classes and points-of-view.

So what will happen to small towns in the future? Will communities allow the life to slowly drain out of them as groups break into factions while individuals can no longer afford to live there, challenged by the same forces that are impacting the national economy? 

Will more towns take a cue from places like Nantucket Island which extensively markets its virtues while retaining tight controls on its historic character. The small town charm of Nantucket now seems almost artificial. It seems incongruous that huge mansions should be shingled by law. Where everyone rode bikes when I was a kid, now there are traffic jams. The choice to make Nantucket a historic conservation and tourist 'playground of the rich' has been accompanied by a major increase in cost-of-living which strains the families of my relatives that still live there.

Can the small businesses hang on as their profit margins become increasingly slim while waiting for the international economy to recover? Or will the chain stores move in as the international oil companies have already to every small town gas station and Coca-Cola and Pepsi compete on shelves of every grocery store? In small towns across the U.S., Wal-Marts and McDonald's have put the Mom-and-Pops out of business. Every other block in Thailand has a 7-11 convenience store.' Will tiny Sharon, Connecticut one day be incorporated into the New York - Boston Metropolis?

Can people afford to go on living their lives in small towns? Two hundred years from now, we will see housewives planting flowers at the crossroads or chatting in the grocery store? Can the small town way of life endure?

Copyright 2010, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)

We've got to get rid of the Trash!

Our world is become plastic-coated. Trash is accumulating everywhere. The following is a series of rather horrifying reports but at the end, I've got a rather imaginative, comical but possible solution.

I have seen trash along the Appalachian Trail, on the streets of every city I've ever been on, on the sides of every highway, people have used their surroundings as a dump.

Soda and water bottles, candy wrappers, and fast food boxes wash up on every beach, microscopic shreds of plastic and rubber float up on remote South Sea islands and here on the Andaman Sea. Measurable amounts of manmade chemicals pollute the deepest sea and highest mountains. Some people seem to waking up -- some of my students created their own "Green TV" videos and animations; my favorite showed a penguin, a dolphin, and a man in a rowboat making their way across ever-rising seas as land disappears. 

 

Tides wash garbage on to the beach


 

Monkeys at beach, Langkawi

. In a small city in Egypt where I once worked, I had no choice but to join the neighbors in throwing garbage bags into the small canal that fed the Nile. Every trip to the open markets meant more black plastic bags -- bags that were discarded on the street and hung from the trees. In front of the door of our apartment house, a broken toilet seat was just the most memorable of the items that had been discarded. Yes, Egypt still has its pyramids and tombs, but all around them, there are plastic bags and coke cans. My lingering impression: Egypt is being buried under black plastic bags.

Yesterday, I was humbled to be invited to visit three homes of single mothers and their children of Indian descent who live in extreme poverty, surrounded by trash. These are women who have almost no skills or resources, living in deteriorating shelters that hardly qualify as houses, unable to leave their situations because they have a number of children that depend on them. The first "house" was reached by crossing through swamp grasses cluttered with trash to a few rooms in a series of cinderblock structures built for workers at a rubber plantation. Behind a door locked with a screwdriver slipped thru a wire, there was a disabled boy hidden away. His sister was lovely, dark-eyed and very bright; his mother classically beautiful but filthy. There was something deeply still about her. The neighboring rooms were deserted and filled with moldering furniture and cardboard.

In a 'kampung' village, the local leader had recommended help for a single mother whose husband had left her. We crossed a yard strewn with trash when the door opened to reveal a sweet-faced girl (old enough that she should have been in school) and two cross-eyed but handsome 18-month old twin boys. Their mother too had the same stillness and reserve -- and a kind of regal quality -- as she accepted boxes of vegetables and eggs.

To reach the third house, we picked our way through a muddy path past houses built up on stilts. Around and under each house, there was garbage everywhere. We climbed a concrete step and entered a large space with a rolled vinyl floor. I took three steps and nearly went through. The floorboards were rotting away. The mother told us her baby had fallen through one day. We spent about 20 minutes there, my hosts from a local charity* there to discuss having repairs made. As we left, we discovered the tide had risen and there was water up to knee-level between us and the path. A truck tire, broken machinery, plastic bottles, and other unspeakable things floated by. We wobbled across a plank to dry land. Thanks to The Charity Club Langkawi for this eye-opening, heart-breaking experience: http://www.langkawicharity.com/ .

Maybe I'm oversensitive but my eyes go to the garbage every time. Two months ago, I went to one of the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen on the north shore of the Andaman Sea island of Langkawi in Malaysia. It was nearly deserted and immaculate -- except for the trash that the resident monkeys had dug out of the bins. A month ago, I went back at the end of a holiday weekend and it was filled with tourist families (many probably from Kuala Lumpur), including many women dressed head to toe in full black purdah (an odd sight for a Westerner to see on a beach). All around them were paper plates, plastic bottles, detritus of fruit and vegetables. The monkeys had a field day. The tide had washed up a line of broken glass, splintered wood, and plastic containers (see photographs with this article). I began to pick up garbage on the beach, motivated because there were so many that would cut the feet of the playing children. People eyed me but no one else was inspired to follow my example. Why couldn't families include cleanup as a routine part of their beach day? Why don't we all routinely plan to bring garbage bags to carry out trash when we go to a park?

From the windows of my condo apartment in Bangsaen, Thailand, where I lived last year, there was a 'million dollar view' looking out over several miles of curving beach from the eighth floor. A forested island floated in mists at the center of the view; at night a line of lights glimmered on the horizon -- cargo ships arriving from all over the world. Thousands of people visited each weekend to swim. About 100 yards out, a net was strung to protect the beach from the sludge that pours down the Chao Phraya river from Bangkok into the Gulf of Thailand. As the tide went out, an oil slick coated the shore, probably from the cargo ships. Children waded out to swim between plastic, aluminum, glass, cardboard and paper. I tried three times to swim but every time stepped on something -- a broken beer bottle, a rusted can, a sopping mess of a cardboard box -- and went back to swim in a pool.

 But of all the shocking and sickening experiences of finding trash marring the environment, the strongest memory I have is of the campus of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. It was the weekend before the university's theatre season was about to start. As a returning graduate student (I had been there some 20 years before for graduate work, then ran several theatre companies myself), I felt it was a duty to to help make the theatre look presentable. I walked around the building and within half an hour collected a pair of man's underwear, a full large garbage bag of recyclables, and used tampons and condoms. The campus where I had had some of my happiest moments two decades before was now covered with trash. The excuse for the overflowing pails was that there were different unions for the upper and lower campuses and they were competing for control and funds.

If only for the cosmetic reasons that trash is such an eyesore, I would like to see people pick up after themselves. "Put trash in its place," as the old campaign said it. It seems shocking that people do not seem to realize that trash attracts rodents, insects, bacteria, viruses. We need to teach people that they are hurting themselves by these habits and empoverished communities need well-equipped team to help.

 The Third World agricultural societies traditionally discarded unwanted items under their houses or in the gardens. Fruit and vegetables skins, human and animal waste, tissue and bones decayed into the soil within a year or two and served to fertilize the earth. Now designer water bottles, plastic shopping bags, and soda cans -- not to mention the wastewater polluted with washing liquids -- all go into the backyard creating hideous personal dumps. Animals tear open the bags. I watched a goat the other day butting a garbage bag and monkeys carrying soda cans across telephone wires.

So - how do we solve the problems of the world? Poverty, hunger, pollution? Here's my idea. Governments start by offering payment to anyone who is living below the local "poverty line" to collect garbage. Teams could be put together and given equipment. In the U.S. and elsewhere, certain communities have become conscientious about recycling -- and thousands of poor people bring metal, glass, and plastics to centers for which they receive much needed pennies. Teams of collectors could be assmbled go out (in lieu of Boy Scouts doing annual cleanups) regularly and pick up the landscape, or be sent to communities to clean up individual hoarders and unofficial dump sites. What can be recycled needs to be systematically organized and the income returned to individuals and communities.

Across the seas and along the seashores, plastic could be collected or swept along by the many cargo ships. Special ships could be sent out to the places where the plastic shreds collect in shoals. These floating islands can be nudged towards the north or the south poles.

Global warming, many scientists think, is occurring because as the atmosphere warms, ice and snow melts. The melting reduces the surface whiteness that reflects the sun, therefore more sunlight reaches the earth which speeds up the warming process.

So here's a counter measure. Sweep the garbage north, drop it from airplanes, deliver it on barges. At each pole, collect the plastic and other manmade detritus from the sea into huge plastic islands. Let the plastic bags from stores around the world and the shreds that choke the fish of the seas be compacted and reused to stop the melting of the poles. Until we can resolve the problems of disposal and recycling of petroleum, rubber, and other products that fill the landfills around the world, perhaps we could put our garbage to work. Let it serve to reflect the sun, cool the planet, and save us from submerging beneath the sea.

It is something like this -- a circle that offers rewards at each step -- that seems to me is our ultimate hope. 



Bangsaen Beach, Thailand



Copyright 2010, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)





Langkawi island, Malaysia



Comparison of Costs of Education

In support of my contention in the "Why Asia" blog entry that the U.S. has become too expensive for a "normal' middle class person (whether foreign or American) to live there. During former President Bush's 8 year 'reign,' the cost-of-living spiraled ever upward. Take a look at the difference in the cost of a term at a university or college. Malaysia, the lowest, offers world class quality at about half the price.

An Estimation of Education Cost for a Bachelor’s Degree Programme in Arts & Business (per year) in Various Countries
Country	Tuition Fees	Living Cost	Total Cost
Australia (public)	USD 8,500	USD 8,500	USD 17,000
Canada (public)	USD 7,500	USD 9,000	USD 16,500
France (public)	minimal	USD13,000	USD 13,000
Malaysia (private)	USD4,600	USD4,000	USD9,000
New Zealand (public)	USD 10,000	USD 11,500	USD 21,500
Singapore (private)	USD 6,500	USD 10,000	USD 16,500
United Kingdom (public)	USD 14,000	USD 12,500	USD 26,500
USA (public)	USD 13,000	USD 12,000	USD 25,000
USA (private)	USD 22,000	USD 13,000	USD 35,000
Source: Study in Malaysia Handbook (International Edition) & various related websites

A Brief History of a Technophiliac

 "Technophilia" -- a love of technology

                This morning, I attempted to set up my mobile phone to communicate with my computer. Apparently, my computer does not have “Bluetooth” installed and therefore I must revert to a cabled connection, unless of course, my mobile has an Infrared connection. My flash drive modem with installed SIM card refused to find its server to allow an internet connection. As I hit the hard stone wall -- unable to connect --  a thought struck me: thousands of generations have never had this problem before. Or spoken this language. Just us. And the ones who come after.

                All my life I have looked forward to the 21^st Century – and I love that I have had the chance to live in it. I consider myself a “technophile,” in love with the machinery and the changes. Almost every day, I find surprise and delight in the workings of technology: the air conditioner, the microwave, the lightbulb, the HD flatscreen TV and how they all give greater comfort and ease to my life. As a child, my favorite reading was the Victor Appleton (Sr, Jr, II) series featuring “Tom Swift,” a boy inventor; my hero was Thomas Edison.  The “Toms,” it seemed to me then, had it right. Creative problem-solving by adapting or creating machinery seemed the most liberating of mental tools to a child who longed to grow up and grow out from under parental and school authorities.

Learning my numbers as a child allowed the added benefit of becoming able to visualize the freedom promised by the future. What would I be able to do that I could not do before? What new technologies would emerge? I spent many hours sketching a personal hovercraft, measuring specifications for a floating table that would be the size of my textbooks, that could accompany me through the school halls, carrying the weight of all those books. Another favorite game was to work out how many years it would be until I left the miseries of being a child and got to be an adult with my own free choice about what to do with my days. How old would I be when the new century dawns? As a ‘baby boomer,’ the Year 2000 – or “Y2K” as we called it then – arrived just days after I turned 46 – finally, a fully fledged, card-carrying “adult” alive in the 21^st Century.

                That New Year’s night (now a decade ago) remains clear in my mind. My mother, who was then on the cusp of so-called “old age” despite looking as lively and young as ever, was the same age my father was when he died. To me, she seemed physically struck down by the change of historical date; she came down with a fever and spent the night in bed. Panicky warnings had been sounding in the media for the previous few months that there was a ‘glitch’ in programming computers – somehow the young blades who designed the software “forgot” that there would be a new century and left out the necessary numerals. Dire warnings were circulated that computers would revert to the year “00” and we would all be thrown back to the birth of Christ. Worse still, it was predicted that whole technological systems that relied on computers would go down – a nation-wide blackout and machine failures of all kinds were to be expected. Serendipity (or unconscious cries for help) brought me a boyfriend who was both a fireman and an Emergency Medical Technician as well as an artist; he lived in a concrete shack with a woodstove, chopped his own wood, even brought home venison steaks from deer he had shot. On a night when it seemed the world might revert back to the conditions of my mother’s childhood, he seemed the perfect person to accompany my ailing mother and anxious me through the dark night of the turning of the centuries.

                Of course, that New Year’s night proved benign; no such disaster occurred. I reprogrammed my computer in plenty of time following the instructions sent out globally.  We broke open a bottle of 50- year old Chinese wine (the Chinese having the world’s longest continuous history but sorry, really awful wine). We toasted the new century. The next day, I taught the boyfriend to use the internet; he met a woman from California online in a  chat room about the Celestine Prophecy (serendipity, again), she came to visit him, and that was that. Fun while it lasted and I am forever grateful. My mother recovered quickly and I went on with my continued fascination about the crossing points between technology and creativity.

                Back in 1982 or ’83, I had been faced with a choice: either hire a secretary to take care of the administrative tasks of a small business or buy a computer. A human being would require a weekly salary, benefits, all sorts of paperwork to be filed with the government; the computer would be a one-time major payment plus yearly upgrades.  It could be used to organize, record, and duplicate the many repetitive tasks, and importantly, would allow me entry into the “wave of the future.” So I bought a Kaypro 2X with a CPM processor which at the time was considered close to the top of the line of personal computers. It was a great old machine in a hard squarish metal case. It was claimed that it could be dropped, used in desert dust, and still go on like the ‘Energizer Bunny’ or the Timex watch that “still keeps on ticking.” That phrase alone, “a Kaypro 2X with a CPM processor” indicates how rapid the changes have been in the ensuing years. It was soon outmoded, its dim screen replaced by a monitor that could show swirling colors and illuminated letters.

Commerce in the early 1990’s began to be “networked” and this technophile saw this development as a fascinating new lexicon of knowledge I might need to know.  I sat in front of a state-of-the-art cream-colored steel box manufactured by IBM, teaching my hands to perform the intricate commands which forced Wordstar and Word Perfect to spit out my words in print. I was lured to explore hundreds of advertisements by a company called appropriately “Prodigy” which allowed “jumps” from category to category, soon switching to America Online for its multicolored screens and its ubiquitous voice bleating, “You’ve got mail.” If it is a typical American trait to discard fashions as soon as they become a fad, then the digital industries got the message – once Marshall McLuhan wrote, “the medium is the message,” upgrades became a way of life.

What I thought I learned then was about the “inner workings” of the machinery and the minds who made the machines. If I pressed the Control button ^ and the one marked P, the computer and the printer would ‘talk’ to each other and out would pop my writings, neatly printed. After hundreds of hours entering addresses into the “DB3” (Dbase 3) and manipulations to produce reports and personalized envelopes, I felt I really understood the how-and-the-why of the logic behind the construction of software designed for office use. I could ‘run chkdsk’ (checkdisk) from the C: (C colon) prompt to check the computer was in working order. By the late 1980’s, I was something of a ‘computer expert’ and in the early 1990’s, I could tell upset customers how to remedy their situations over the phone.  “User friendly” was the watchword of the times and I repeatedly explained to others that computer software was still in its infancy. “I know the computer doesn’t respond the way you expect it to,” I would reassure, “but you need to follow the software designer’s logic, not your own. Someday, the industry will have studied enough customers’ complaints and they will make it easier. But for now, just read the instruction manual and follow the sequence exactly as it tells you to…”

                Always the forward thinker, my father protested the establishment of computer studies programs in editorials in the New York Times and at faculty meetings at Vassar College. The monolithic International Business Machines (IBM) was just down the road in Poughkeepsie, New York from Vassar where he taught for 25 years. IBM offered the college some 35 million dollars to set up a computer center and provide the technical support for a degree program. His was a lonely voice in the crowd when he stood up in faculty meetings. His main point: it is not the initial cost but the upkeep. He argued that in an academic institution of Vassar’s caliber, all funds should go first towards hiring the most qualified scholars, the best administrators, and scholarships for the best students – support for the people, in other words; then to improvements to the teaching facilities including the buildings. All expenditures should foster the highest intellectual aims.  He understood the “continuous upgrade” mentality years ahead. Funds would necessarily be diverted to the purchase of new computer equipment in order to “keep up with the times.” It would be interesting to track expenditures in the following years within one institution and within one particular computer studies program, but on the larger scale, his words were prophetic. How many billions have gone to equipment rather than to people since the personal computer began its conquest of the modern world? (Perhaps this could be an interesting study for a doctoral dissertation).

To come to 2010, the ‘guts’ of the machinery are far less transparent than they were back in the eighties. Icons have replaced written commands (thanks be to Apple / MacIntosh and Steve Jobs) and “user friendly” has been replaced by intuitive and “visual “intelligences.” Last spring, I installed a new version of Microsoft Office on my computer in order to work on a booklet to assist Thai teachers of English language. However, as I was working at the time in Thailand, some internal switch buried deep in the computer converted all the written commands into the elegant loops of Thai language – which I cannot read. Lucky for me, the icons remain the same and I could look up their meanings on the Microsoft website tutorials. Always a “PC” IBM and Microsoft aficionado, I was reminded of my first experience on a “Mac” in 1990 when I was working in Japan and all the commands were in Japanese. Hunting-and-pecking until I found what the visual clues (cues) lead to, I understood why artists were attracted to Macs / Apples. These machines exploited the over-arching logic by which, as the Chinese proverb says, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

The secrets of the thousands of steps necessary to produce action by the computer’s ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ machinery and processes, the mechanics of technology are hidden away, like a safe locked up behind a picture on a wall. Click on an icon and wonders happen. The disadvantage is that I can no longer be a ‘computer expert.’ No matter how long I hunt and peck or how many emails I send asking for help, neither I nor local computer experts here in Malaysia can seem to reprogram my expensive MS Office software to override the Thai language commands and return them to U.S. (or at least Malaysian) English.

For the “21^st Century mind,” it looks like language will become less necessary and that technology will serve as a bridge across many social divides. The new generations all over the world are fluent in technology.  Three year olds can play games on computers, two year olds can sing ‘

Sesame Street

’ songs. This week, the six year old child of a Chinese-Malaysian friend showed me her new mobile phone (pink, with Miss Kitty emblazoned, of course). All people with access to electricity can switch on a light bulb. Billions are well-versed in the forms and content of television, movies, print media, and the images that advertise popular brands. Last night, a man from Uzbekistan, fluent in Uzbeq and Russian, drew pictures for me and I taught him the English words for spring, summer, fall, and winter. I showed him handouts and powerpoints I had compiled using graphics downloaded from the internet. We communicated surprisingly well as we shared familiarity with the same imagery.  Though we live now in the tropics, we both came from places with seasonal changes. We both drank Pepsi. We swam in the same pool.  If I can figure out how to get my CD burner working again, I will provide him with a CD of Word documents and Powerpoints to take home to study – or he can plug in his flashdrive to download them directly from my computer.

Meantime, I puzzle over the uniquely 21^st Century problems and frustrations never before faced by previous generations. I invoke the spirits of Tom Swift and Tom Edison, and request a little help from Bill Gates. Alternatively, if worse comes to worse, I will head for the nearest computer repair shop and continue to save up my pennies for the inevitable “next upgrade” to a new computer. Three guiding principles for the confirmed technophile that the Toms taught are that 1) there is always another alternative (even if it is just to give up); 2) if you hunt-and-peck persistently, you may be able to find an answer; 3) if you wait long enough -- as the speed and quantity of inventions multiply exponentially in this current age -- something new will be invented to solve your problem.

May the 21^st Century bring solutions to some of the greater issues: overpopulation, surpluses of manmade trash, overabundance of carbon dioxide leading to global warming, poverty, starvation, and the many other ills we face. My fervent hope is that the next generations with their fluent use of technologies  will use the tools for the planetary good. May creativity and inventiveness never go out of style!