What IS the world coming to?

I never planned to become an old fuddy-duddy who asked "What's the world coming to?"--but  sometimes I feel those words right on the tip of my tongue.  When informed that school children are no longer taught cursive writing even though it's been shown to contribute to brain development, even though it's a second nature pleasure to those of us who use it every day, I got as far as "What's the..." and stopped myself.

I was horrified at this loss of a perfectly easy skill to learn--in favor of keyboard preference and test scores that only cover "measurable" skills.  I waxed nostalgic about all those days in hard wooden desks in third grade copying those letters from the Palmer Handwriting Manual.

I can't throw away handwritten notes and cards.  There's something heartwarming about the recognizable humanity in the handwriting of people we love, like a different kind of snapshot.  You'd have to use a microscope to read Mimi's letters. She had the tiniest script I've ever seen, and her handwritten letters are still intact.  Carlene has a smoothly consistent handwriting, beautiful lettering.  My daddy's was a sort of hybrid of print and cursive.  Will's is tight, Day's is loose.  Linda Kot can write backwards!  And I can tell my mood of the day by my handwriting.

When my elders asked that rhetorical question, "What is the world coming to?" when I was little, I was puzzled.  Coming to?  Where had it been?

In the late 60s, there was a rock concert in Georgia (near Mimi and Papa's house) as large, maybe larger, than Woodstock. I remember going there on the last day--after bikers had crashed the gates and made it, literally, a free-for-all.  People were walking around sunburned, dazed, and half-naked (some altogether naked, actually).  I remember a skinny girl about my age hawking mescaline in small baggies.

The grounds were littered with beer cans, trash, diapers and food containers.  The bands had already left that Sunday afternoon, their massive audience reduced to ragged little tents of people who'd been there all weekend, red-eyed and stoned.  Here and there you could hear music on boom boxes, but nothing live.

Papa, my granddaddy, had heard rumors about it. "What's the world coming to?" he asked, shaking his head.  On that occasion, since I was by then a mature sixteen-year-old, I sort of wondered the same thing.

Later that year, my daddy forbade me to see "Joy in the Morning" showing at the Vogue Theater downtown--although Betty and I had already seen it with our mamas.   Hollywood was taking us down a dangerous road, he said.  Carlene was ironing when he said that, and she didn't look too worried.

"Joy in the Morning"was tame by today's rating standards, but after years of watching couples on TV saying polite goodnights from one twin bed to the other, it was scandalous, seeing even subtle suggestions of sex on the big screen.

What came down the road along with it were "Where the Boys Are" and "A Summer Place." Still no actual nudity or sex scenes  (the cameras averted their eyes just in the nick of time) but they got closer than anything we'd ever seen, ending with messages about the frightful things that could befall a girl should she cross that dangerous line.

In "Where the Boys Are," the one girl who did, on the Spring Break trip to Florida,  lost her virginity, then her mind.  The movie closed with a scene of the bad girl  walking aimlessly down a deserted street, disheveled and dazed.

The road has become the Information Highway bearing trucks of all sorts, some filled with trash, some with treasure.  We have ads for Viagra and mini-narratives about erectile dysfunction advising us to call the doctor if the success of the drug lasts for more than four hours. We have Ted Talks, podcasts, and streaming movies; blogs and YouTube and Pandora.The road goes on forever, as Robert Earle Keene's song has it, but only time will tell where it's going to end up.












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