How does it feel to be heading back to the caves?

One thing I truly mourn in our modern societies is the almost total lack of community organizations – at least compared to days gone by…..when I was growing up in Hanover, service clubs played an integral part of life…..Hanover’s Rotary Club sponsored a really big Cornfest for many years and there was a Kinsmen Carnival in town when I was a kid and the local swimming pool had been built by the Kinsmen, and even though I was just a young whip of a guy and didn’t really understand how service organizations worked, they were all around me. When I moved to Wallaceburg in 1985, there were about 70 non profit or charitable organizations in the community and, through bingo, they were responsible to pumping about $1 million in charitable cash back into town every year. It was staggering

Today, in Wallaceburg, those organizations are pretty well gone. There are a few still hanging on, but not many and they are literally hanging on. When I moved here, there were 40 guys in Kinsmen, another 40 in Jaycees, Rotary had about 30 well-heeled members, there was a Lions’ club that was very active, two Masonic temples, two IODE chapters, and on and on and on….pretty well everyone in town was connected in one way or another into this huge community network. And nearly all gone. Young people simply don’t get involved in community organizations the way past generations did. And the excuse the younger folks almost always give is that they don’t have the time – they’re lives are just too busy, what with working and raising children and all the responsibility that takes.

And that, of course, is total and absolute balderdash…..most people I knew back in the day, myself included, were enormously busy on a day-to-day basis….I worked usually over 60 hours a week and had lots of family duties to uphold, but still found time to get involved in a large number of community activities – some connected to my job as a newspaperman – but a lot just because they were things I sort of felt I should be involved in. The big difference between then and now are computer-related devices and the massive amount of time most people spend on them. I see reports all the time in the media that average daily usage of these things can be 2-3 hours a day and sometimes as high as 5-6 hours a day. That’s the most ludicrous thing possibly in the history of humanity. I was a newspaper reporter for much of my life and I lived and died by the phone and I didn’t spend nearly that much time attached to it. People have become bloody addicted to these “devices” and most of the stuff they use them for is inane and useless….dumb and dumber….

Stuff like social media was supposed to make us way more connected as we moved forward as a species. Instead, in many, many cases, it is fracturing and polarizing our societies in ways we could never have foreseen….it is driving us apart instead of bringing us together. I use social media to try to get my writing out to a wider audience and to try to network with other artists and to interact with friends from the old days, many of who are on Facebook – it’s a fun place to talk about bands from the old days and stuff like that. But I’ve learned, and it took me a while, that politics just doesn’t seem to fly on social media. It’s far too divisive and that’s something we really don’t need on this planet these days. As I’ve said countless time before in my writing, we badly need to start pulling together on this planet – trying to all row in the same direction to get the boat going where we’d like it to….

Anyway, the loss of our many and varied community organizations has been a rather large step backward for our societies. I can’t imagine there’s any way to get them going again at this point. The world has changed too much and today we live in the “land of many devices” and there’ll be no way to get away from that any time soon. Did you know the average IQ of the planet has been steadily declining since the advent of the internet? Why? you ask…..because people no longer have to retain knowledge – they can just “google” everything….also, people don’t read like they used to and “writing” skills are also in rapid decline….yup, the machines may be getting smarter, but, at the same time, we’re headed in the opposite direction….back to the caves…..