If I think about how life used to be, I realize that we are a lot less free than we were when I was growing up in the 40s and 50s. Some, but not all, of this is government action. I used to be able to cross the Canada/US border with no more ID than a driver’s licence. I could get on any train, bus, or even plane with only a ticket. Now you cannot travel without ID on most modes of transportation (except, of course, a private car, but if you have an EZ-Pass, your travel can be recorded). The last time I took the NY to Montreal train in January, they were opening and inspecting luggage and there was a guy in uniform with a machine gun supervising this. It wasn’t just people going to Montreal as the train made many stops in the US, for example, Albany.
AMTRAK has now put a limit of two bags. They are not enforcing it yet, but what are they trying to do, make train travel just as unpleasant as air. The first time I took a train from Montreal to NY, the border agents got on the train and the train didn’t stop. The last time, the train stopped for about an hour and a half while the border agents, who did get on, examined everyone minutely. I used to take the bus to NY and the border guards (in each direction) would get on the bus and do their thing. Now you have to get off, get all your luggage off the bus and go through the inspection indoors, although there is a lot of waiting outside, even in winter, because the customs house is too small. And don’t tell me that terrorists are riding the bus or train these days. Why would they be so foolish when entry by car is so much easier? Many years ago, it was given as evidence of how restrictive the Soviet gov’t was that people could not travel without an internal passport. We call it a driver’s license (or state ID) but we cannot travel in the US without a photo ID of some sort and I don’t see in what way that differs from that internal passport.
But it’s not just transportation or even gov’t action that irritates me. Starting when I was about ten, I would get on a trolley (now called a tram) and go downtown by myself or with a friend. And there was nothing unusual about this. When I came home from school, I would throw my schoolbag (not a wheeled cart that many kids use now) in the door and then go out to play on the street till dinner-time. This did become harder after cars became commoner even on the side streets we played on. And I was never walked (we didn’t even own a car until my last year in HS) to school (although for a while the street I had to cross to get to school was Route 1). My kids also walked to school (but that was only a half block away) but my grandkids are always driven to school, always. It is about a fifteen minute walk, but with only a couple of dead end suburban streets to cross. Even the 15 1/2 year old (who now has a learner’s permit!) is driven to school (about 20 minutes away) every day. And everywhere else, since there is almost no public transit where they live (one bus that runs once an hour and stops at the bottom of a long hill from the house). But worse than that, no one ever goes out to play on the street. They live in a cul-de-sac and there is hardly any traffic, but it would be considered child neglect to allow them out of the house on their own. They have “play dates” inside or in fenced in backyards.
People are just much more restricted than they used to be. And like a lobster cooked gradually in a pot, they never seemed to notice.
I live on a cul de sac and my kids have my full permission to go outside and play anywhere they want. We have a park a couple of kilometers away and they can bike there anytime. The problem is, they usually don’t want to! The fact of the matter is that no one else is outside.
Heck, when I was a kid all the neighbourhood kids were ALWAYS outside. You only stayed in on rainy days and were bored shitless. Now there’s 24 hour kids programming on TV. There’s the Internet and DVDs and iPods and XBoxs and text messaging, etc. Kids actually find it quite boring to go outside and play now. Why the hell go play hide and seek with friends when you can play Call of Duty on XBox live?
The world is closing in
Did you ever think
That we could be so close, like brothers
The future’s in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change
ahh…remember the good ol’ days, with no restrictions…
… when a man could ride his horse across the open plain all day and not be stopped by a single fenceline?
… when a boy could take his father’s Winchester and go shoot a turkey for dinner?
…etc, etc,
Sorry to tell you this, but:
The times they are a-changin’.
And they always have.
Deal with it.
Yeah, I should be nostalgic about the old times, too, when my parents sent me to play outdoors all evening and nobody worried. Except that I didnt want to play outdoors. It was boring. I would have loved it if I could have imagined a world full of interesting stuff to do on a keyboard and screen.
Oh, and that famous quote about how kids today no longer respect their elders…I forget who said it*…but I’ll bet he’s a bit older than Hari Seldon
People who haven’t experienced what the OP has talked about have little to compare. That’s when we get the standard chappachula response. Predictable rascal, you! There may come a time when it will make more sense to you, unfortunately. And you will hear the same from younger folks.
This is the way it all goes down - through the ages. I don’t suppose you can really assign a value to what is lost as a great deal of it is within rather than without. Not only do things change but also what they mean in context to society changes. When you think about that, it’s a large loss.
Navigating all this is definitely not for the weak of heart. Ultimately chappachula is correct. In modern parlance we suck up the loss. And hopefully we also move along.
I sort of grew up in a shift from kids outdoors to kids indoors. When I was a little boy, ages 5-12ish probably, I was always outside. So was every other child in my neighborhood. We may go in and play the PS3 for an hour, but if we did, that was at night time.
Then, as I grew up a little more, nobody really did the outside thing. There are a plethora of kids in my neighborhood - I see them all the time, just not playing around outside like we used to. I’m 17 now, so if I do any playing outside it is usually basketball with some friends or something, but the yards really arent as busy as they used to be. Maybe its a demo change and my post is totally absurd.
When was the last time you traveled between NY and Montreal? If it was very recently, could it have something to do with the G20 conference in Toronto?
In 2005 I took a train from Vancouver BC to Seattle, which is only 157 miles altogether but takes over four hours because of the delay at the border. Compared with entering by private car from Mexico, where you have to idle your engine for an hour a more as you creep along torward the border gates, I’d much rather take it easy on the train in a nice comfortable business class seat, or belly up to the bar in the lounge car. But the questions the ICE agents ask!* “Why did you go to Canada”?" Was I supposed to raise my hand and ask to leave the country?
Just for the record, the last time I took the train between Montreal and NY was over Christmas vacation. We went to NY on Christmas Day and came back in early January. No connection with the G8/G20 summits. Not that I could see what impact they would have.
When my kids were growing up in the 70s and 80s they didn’t play in the street, but did go to friends’s houses unsupervised. In the neighborhood where my older son lives, you could get a visit from child welfare if your 10 year old is outside unsupervised (that’s in Redmond, WA). A mother was heavily criticized in NYC for letting her 10 year old ride the subway alone, something I did all the time when I was 10.
But it is the official scrutiny that irks me the most. It doesn’t have to be that way. There is virtually no border control in Europe, even, say, between Switzerland and the EU. Forty six years ago, the first time I was in Europe, the border controls were heavy-handed. Our phones can be tapped without warrant, our library records subpeoned, all without notice, our emails and our postings on the boards are all subject to official scrutiny (well our postings are public, I know).
On the other hand, when you were a kid in the '40s and '50s, something like this could never have happened. This would have been pretty unlikely, too. And then there’s this, which would have been literally inconceivable.
I see a decent number of kids out playing, and we let my gf’s 12 y.o. little brother bike to school and roam more or less free through the neighborhood, at least while the sun is up. People that whisper darkly about Child Protective Services being called to seize their children if they’re allowed to spend the afternoons unsupervised live must live in places that are very different from anywhere I’ve ever been.
No doubt kids do spend less time outside playing then they once did, but that’s because there’s a lot more to do inside then there once was (basically, TV/Computer games/internet), so they choose to say indoors more. I’m not sure having more options for entertainment makes kids “less free”.
As Miller points out, for huge portions of the US population, saying the 40’s or 50’s were less free is pretty laughable.
The sad thing is that with so many sedentary things to entertain them and so many m-m-more “treats” available our children are becoming obese and childhood diabetes is rising at a frightful rate.
It’s that tired old saying, probably as old as Aristotle or one a them guys - too much of a good thing isn’t good for us.
And I keep wondering how they are going to twist the current message that “Diversity is good” once we are more globalized. We’ll have to do a one-eighty and start teaching our kids, “Being the same is good.” Hah.
Still thinking on this, Hari. Could it be that the globalization process will limit our freedoms of personal expression? The larger the group of people the more standardized the need for social control becomes it would seem.
Again, maybe Redmond WA, is some sort of weird police state as compared to the rest of the US, but I’ve lived in several neighborhoods where kids frequently played outside and never heard of it attracting any sort of attention from the local gov’t. Do you have a cite that this happened, I suspect there was more to the story then simply a kid playing outside?
Courts couldn’t subpeona peoples library records in the 40’s or 50’s? Why not?
Well, thats certainly a recent development, but I don’t think a decay of freedom is the reason postings to the SDMB weren’t subject to “official scrutiny” in the 40’s.
Certainly there’s a tension between gov’t trying to enforce laws and the interests of privacy and civil liberties, but I don’t think this is some crazy new development. The Cold War, especially, was rife with government over-reach in attempts to fight both real and imagined (and sometimes downright silly) threats from Communists.
I get what you’re saying, Hal, at least about the kids playing thing. When I was a kid, say elementary and junior high age, I lived in a neighborhood that was teeming with kids. Every night in the summertime, there’d be dozens of kids running around, playing tag and kick the can and stuff like that. My little brother is five years younger than me, and when he got to be that age, that was all gone. There were literally no kids outside in the summer evenings any more, even though there were just as many living there. The difference? The Nintendo came out during the years between us. My brother’s childhood memories are of the various Nintendo games that he used to play. I don’t think he considers it sad, but I do.
When I was 12 and my brother was 9, we were living near San Francisco and my mom allowed the two of us to fly out to Honolulu by ourselves for about 3 days.
Now both my parents worked for the same international airline and in Honolulu we stayed in a hotel that was 100% leased by said airline… so the other guests were crew and airline families. My mom knew all the staff at the place and everyone knew the arrangement. We didn’t think anything of it (early 80s).
Now my little brother has kids of his own and they have none of the freedoms we had.
I agree about the first and third; especially the latter. But Margaret Chase Smith and Maureen Neuberger were senators, although they were originally appointed to replace their deceased husbands.
What I forgot to say, the straw that generated my complaint, was a very minor thing. There is a footbridge over some railroad tracks that divide my town in two. Suddenly, a sign appeared at each end of this not very long bridge (not over 30’) that it was closed between 11PM and 6AM. There were also gates added at each end, each with a padlock. So someone comes around every evening at 11 and locks the gates and someone comes every morning at 6 to open them. There is no discernible purpose to this restriction. The bridge separates one residential neighborhood from another and there are car bridges about two blocks away in each direction. It is just a matter of exerting control.
Several years ago, my wife and I went to a nearby park to view a passage of the space station at 10:15 one summer evening from a treeless and relatively dark hillock about 15’ high, when a police car drove up and ordered us to leave because the park was legally closed at 10. I explained that we just wanted to watch the space station and he told us to go somewhere else and watch it. Don’t these cops have anything better to do?
Just look at how high the incarceration rate is. Yes there is a half-black, half-white president, but I recently read that something like 20% of black males spend some time in the clink. I think a major raison d’être of the laws against drugs, specifically against marijuana is to keep blacks under control. Canada was on the point of repealing their anti-hash laws a few years ago until the US threatened that every car crossing the border would be subject to detailed search. (I think they should have done it anyway and expose how hollow the threat was.)
And in reply to another posting, yes they could have subpeoned your library records years ago, had such records existed (they didn’t of course, a bunch of date stamps in cards in the back of the books were meaningless), but the librarian could certainly have warned you without facing penalties herself.
My complaint is that our lives are more closely circumscribed than ever before.
