One of the common conceptions of older people today seems to be that if the person is over 70 years old they are probably old-fashioned, resistant to change, and out of touch with the times. Since I crossed that 70-year-old line a few years back, I want to react to that idea.
For many of us who have become older, I want to acknowledge a measure of truth in the common view. However, people need to look at the issue with a perspective on what these older folks have seen and lived through in their 70-some-years experience of living.
First, yes, there are some things about old-fashioned ways and gadgets that we liked. We are reluctant to let go of them. I like my old feather pillow. I can wad it into whatever shape seems comfortable for sleeping, sometimes changing several times during the night.
I like seeing people wave a hand when they meet on the road. People used to do that commonly in the horse and buggy days. Yes, that kind of thing gets harder and weirder in big cities and massive crowds, but it seems strange to us to meet another person along the way and to pass them by as if they don't exist.
Yes, we sometimes become resistant to change. But that may not mean that we are just mindlessly resistant to change. It may mean that, having come through a lifetime of changing, we have grown weary of changing, especially when the ways we have learned and adopted along the way seem quite effective and good. I.e., why take on new things just because they are new, when we may think the older way is convenient and quicker. For example, I still like to make notes to myself, on slips of paper to be carried in my shirt pocket, written out in cursive handwriting. I can find information such as appointment times, names and phone numbers, or to-do reminders quite quickly that way -- quicker than I could look them up on a computer or smart phone.
Another example, I liked the Windows 3.1 operating system for the computer, better than I have liked Windows 95 or Windows XP or Windows 7 or Windows 10 or whatever is the latest. I still think some of the old MSDOS command line inputs are handier and more specifically helpful than today's graphical computer interfaces. Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS was a great, great word processing program. Lotus 1-2-3 was a great, great spreadsheet application. dBase III was a great, great database management program.
To further defend us older people, it is not as though our record would show us to be all stubbornly set-in-our-ways. We have been changing, sometimes radically changing, for most of our 70-plus years. Sometimes in this day of heavy reliance on high technology, we need to remind ourselves that the human race only recently came into this high-technology-driven way of life, and that earlier generations of humanity did not spend their time lamenting that their way of life was primitive. People who lived in earlier times found ways to be quite happy, to write great music and great books, to form great concepts of democratic government, to invent amazing machines and tools and equipment, to work out great concepts of mathematics, and to set forth a high principled, noble and humane way of life despite the challenges and limitations of their times.
Sometimes we need to give thought to the downsides of our new things, and not be mindlessly fascinated with the newness and excitements of things that are novel and innovative. For example, as we have begun using social media, are those practices making us a more enlightened people? Helping us form more noble relationships? Making us better informed citizens? Are we using high-technology to shape a more noble version of human life, or are we using new media to rip people apart and to take selfish advantage of others?
The telephone is one item that provides illustrations of the changes we older people have experienced and adopted. We 70-plus-ers began when telephones were available in a few places, but few people had them. The telephone systems at first were local systems using a party-line arrangement. You made calls by ringing a central operator, and the operator would plug your line into the sockets for the party you wanted to talk to. Each party on a party line had a distinctive ring, such as a short and two longs, or a short and a long and a short. If you were snoopy, you could listen in to your neighbor's conversation. Of course that was frowned upon. Sometimes you had to ask someone to yield the line so you could call the doctor, or make an urgent call.
In the mid-1950s, the Pea Ridge Telephone Company, which was located in the north-most block of today's North Curtis Avenue, worked out an arrangement so that most people, farmers and townspeople alike, could have telephones. Those were the new dial phones, which could dial long distance without working through an operator. But, we still had information operators, real people, who could look up phone numbers for us, and help make connections. Then, in the 1990s, inventors came up with cell phones, little radios equipped with cameras and computer software. Then came smart phones, capable of accessing and using the Internet, viewing and interacting with web pages, downloading music and videos, and all. What will they come up with next?
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.