HOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED SINCE I WAS SMALL

Much has changed since I was a child. And much of value has been lost that speaks to the farther reaches of our humanity.

Dear Reader: I will be away for several weeks and will suspend posting my essays until I return. Many thanks for your continuing interest. - Joe

This is a big, indeed voluminous, topic. I was born not long after the Second World War ended when Harry Truman was president. You could still buy a Coca-Cola for six cents and ride on the subway for fifteen.

The world has changed dramatically since then and I have as well. In a moment of reflection, I pondered a few ways in which the world has changed since I was a child of elementary school age. There are many, needless to say, but I would like to share three. Perhaps I can be accused of a romantic kind of nostalgia, or implicitly seeking to transform our complex world into the relatively simple and innocent outlook of a child. At the same time, I will argue that something objective and valuable has been lost. And if reality could be reshaped according to my wishes, I would like to see them restored.

Here is my short list that comprises my lost world:

First, is a sense of freedom I had as a child. I grew up in an apartment building in Forest Hills, Queens. It was a post-war edifice in what was an urban jungle of such structures that stretched endlessly. Yet, it was the world I knew as a child. New York City is impersonal, and at first blush a looming and dehumanizing environment. The challenge of every City child, through play and imagination, is to humanize dehumanized spaces. My neighborhood became a large and familiar play space.

My mother was not a permissivist, but she was not overly anxious about my safety either. After I finished my homework, my world was mine. I would very often venture forth to my school playground to play punchball or stickball with friends and then roam the neighborhood in pairs or small hordes. There would often be stops at the pizzeria or at the candy store for an egg cream and a candy bar. Often on Sundays, there were long walks to the movie theater, where we could take in the double feature.

My territory veered about five blocks from my home in all directions. I had free rein. Only if I changed course and made an unplanned visit to a friend's home, did she insist that I call to inform her as to where I was. But my freedom extended on occasion beyond the neighborhood. From the time I was eleven, I could ride the subways by myself. This was always an exciting adventure. The trains roaring underground evoked a sense of fascination and frisson. Trips to Manhattan were like entering the Emerald City. I traveled, often alone or with a companion, to the Museum of Natural History to wander its cavernous halls, and with my encyclopedic mentality, take in the descriptions accompanying endless exhibits as if they were holy writ. Sometimes, with a friend, I would travel to the Bronx to watch the Yankees play at the Stadium. As a child, I was free to explore, soak in the environment, and let my imagination roam. In ways unexplainable, I believe the freedom of my childhood was an important element that fostered my growth and maturation. In my freedom, I felt that life was good.

Today, I conclude that children greatly lack that freedom. Open spaces have been greatly replaced with time spent engaged with screens. Real-life experiences have been greatly replaced with synthetic ones. A recent survey found that children spend on average seven hours a day interacting with digital devices. Absent a probing psychological analysis, I doubt whether this is a good thing, and though I can be accused of moralism, I don't believe that this is what childhood should be about.

Moreover, as if a pall of fear has descended on family life, children are greatly placed under surveillance. They are not free to roam, explore, or in an unfettered way, create their own experiences. Free time has long been replaced by “play dates.” “Playdate” seems like a self-contradictory concept. By definition, play is expansive, free, and unbounded. By fitting it within a time-bound framework, the very reality of play is compromised. I conclude it is worth considering what changes in social values would need to be effectuated to restore greater freedom to the lives of our children.

My second observation is related to the first. When I was a child, I was taught that the world was a friendly place overall and apprehended it as such. I recall my mom, who, as noted, let me roam free, would advise me, “Joseph, if you get lost, approach a stranger and ask that person for help.” Today such advice might find the parent arrested for child abuse. She made it clear, however, that I was not to get into a car with a stranger.

But the underlying message, again, was that the world was prevailing a safe place and that the people in it were generally committed to the welfare of children, everyone's children.

Today, I believe, children are reared with the belief that the world is a dangerous place and strangers are to be feared. This shift in generic social perceptions is radical. I have read no studies as to the internalized differences such a shift makes in the emotional character of children as they grow. But I conclude that perceiving the world as fearsome as opposed to being a friendly place cannot be a change of small consequence.

Contrariwise, what is objectively true is that the world of my childhood was one in which adults in general felt responsibility for the well-being and socialization of everyone's children. Public misbehavior would also bring a reprimand from a stranger who witnessed it. This broader sense of responsibility has fallen away, with the effect that parents today cannot look to society at large for support in raising their children. As a result, adults are more alone in raising their children, and their children grow up in a more fractured, isolated world.

A final observation in this short list is that personal life has become more commodified. We live in an intensely market-driven, profit-fueled world. The corporation is the model that has leached down to inform personal life and personal relations. One senses that an ethos of relentless work and productivity, a culture of “busyness,” sets the standards for human behavior in all dimensions of life, public and private.

In my childhood, if I had the impulse to go out with a friend to play, I would walk or ride my bike to his home, and if he were free the time was ours. The sensibility was one of spontaneity. Such spontaneity has gone out of contemporary life. Time spent with a friend nowadays resembles organizing a business meeting, often shoehorned into the vestigial time left over from more officious and putatively more important obligations.

I have one friend who occasionally calls in the morning to ask “Joe, are you free for lunch today?” A simple gesture to be sure. I cite it because, in its spontaneity, it is so very rare.

My graduate school mentor, Cornel West, has written compellingly of market and non-market values. His concern is that our lives have been overwhelmingly consumed, and are driven, by the values of the market. But it is in non-market values, love, friendship, community, and, personal autonomy, and play, also, that our humanity is most readily found.

I return to the experiences of my childhood to find and reconfirm these non-market values. But I contend that they are by no means childish. They reveal perennial truths. In the face of the stifling realities of modern life, and the Procrustean forces that so squeeze the joy from our souls, we need to rebel. In the face of challenges, we need to refashion our society to make primary those values that matter most. We need to strive to build into our hurried existence those experiences that truly give life.