Subject: thinking in and out of boxes: thinking in and out of boxes
What an amazing child is our four year old great grandson. I'll put him up against any other four year old on the block.
Not only is he a well mannered lad, but he is full of smiles and "Yes Please", and "No Thankyou," and plenty of hugs and "I Love You's."
This boy has the amazing ability to entertain himself for hours on end. He moves his little toys around him, chattering and laughing, totally focused on his imaginary world.
He can also draw amazing pictures of things no one else has ever seen. He colors them with his water color paints, making them unbelievably beautiful.
And he has more questions than any four adults can possibly have answers. I know this because we just spent four happy days with this young Free Spirit.
But even as he moved about, creating unbelievable beauty by his mere presence, a great sadness began to fill me.
In his innocent young world he could not begin to see the Forces and Pressures moving in on him.
Ellensburg is a University Town. But you'd never know it unless you tripped over the Campus. If there is any enlightenment in the hallowed halls of Central Washington University, a school of over 10,000 students, it does not filter out into the town.
Spending considerable time wandering among the TV and radio offerings, I found nothing even close to "the Liberal Media". On the radio, Religious Broadcasts were as numerous as Country Music, Sports Talk Shows and Commercials.
The TV carried all of the same programming found on TV's from Coast to Coast.
Daily news was passed out through the town by the Yakima Harold, a very Right leaning paper. Unless a person prowled the Internet seeking counter views, the overall "information" picture was a very tepid one.
In fact, speaking of tepid, , we dined out in a rather upscale restaurant one evening and I asked for a cup of coffee. The young waitress brought me a cup and then came back to take our order. "This coffee is rather tepid", I said. "Tepid?" she asked in a puzzled voice.
"Yes, tepid." "What does tepid mean?" she asked.
"Did you attend college here?" I inquired.
"I'm a graduate," she assured me.
The next day we were still chuckling over this young woman's admission that she'd never run across tepid before. Chatting with a charming energetic young woman in the Sundry store, I told her about the encounter with the waitress the prior evening. "...And," I chuckled, "She didn't know what Tepid meant. And she graduated from college right here."
"I've got a Masters degree from Central Washington, and I've not heard the word, either. It must be a generational thing", she said in a very serious voice.
Yoiks!!!
Just the same, this town is Tepid in all aspects of the word.
How is a little free Spirit going to grow strong and free and independent when his entire tepid world offers no challenges, no opposing views, no exposure to the big wide wonders of this diverse world?
And how do any of us really break free? Aren't we fooling ourselves if we think that we have learned to think outside of the box? Aren't we merely jumping from one box into another?
Have we not written our Classic Tragedy based on our own Human destiny? The very characteristics that have raised us up from the primal Slime, enabling us to create the wonders of our modern civilization, are the very same characteristics that will bring us down.
Carl Jarvis
***
"We do not inherit the land from
our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
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