CSotD: Gee, our old LaSalle ran great!
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Today's triple-feature starts out innocently enough, in Between Friends: Kids take for granted the technology they have known most of their lives.
Admittedly, it's a bit of a stretch to assume Danny doesn't know people who don't have multiple cell phones (grandparents?). But, even if he wouldn't likely be unaware of the concept of a home with nothing but a single landline, he might well be flummoxed by thoughts of a time when, once you left the house, you could no longer be reached, not because you had chosen not to have a cell phone, not because you had forgotten your phone and not because you had let the battery run down but because — aside from pagers, which were carried only by a few professionals — the technology simply didn't exist.
And it's certainly true that much of his concept of how families communicate and how the world works in general depends on that level of instant access to each other.
A more deliberate attempt to invoke history and generational splits comes from today's Stone Soup:
Jan Eliot isn't actually playing with the idea of how quickly time passes so much as she is with the futility of it all. Holly feels the Civil Rights Movement is ancient history, and she's right, or at least, she should be.
The Civil Rights Movement, as a formal piece in history, was half a century ago, not only before a middle-school kid's time but before her parents' time as well. It should be history. It should be over. But, as the story on the radio reminds us, it isn't.
So, while this seems to link to Between Friends, it's actually making the opposite statement, not that our kids take progress for granted, but that we do, and that things which we would hope should be consigned to the past remain alive today.
Which brings us to today's Edge City:
Now we're going back almost three-quarters of a century, but the question of what has been lost, what should be lost and what must never be lost is purposely stated with even less clarity.
Again, even Abby is far too young to have any personal memory of the Holocaust, and it's perfectly natural that her son, Colin, files it away as history.
But while Val herself is feeling betrayed that history won't stay history, Abby fears that it will fade away into the realm of things that no longer matter.
A major difference is that this is Colin's own history. The history Holly dismisses is only collectively, not ethnicly, hers, and she not only lives in an immediate world where Jim Crow has no real presence, but her mother's boyfriend is African-American.
I can't imagine that Danny, even living north of the border, would toss off the Civil Rights Movement quite so easily as Holly does. The nation's cultural center is called "Toronto the Good," not "Toronto the Perfect." (Ironically, in yesterday's Between Friends, done well before the Trayvon Martin issue exploded, Danny asks his mother to iron his hoodie. I'm sure I'm not the only reader who shuddered.)
I don't know what the reaction would be if Danny did dismiss the Civil Rights Movement the way Holly did, but I think we're about to find out the reaction to the child of an observant Jewish couple dismissing the Holocaust as history.
Maybe it's time for Val to plan another get-together, but this time with a more specific agenda for discussion, and with a different set of Moms.
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