The Last of Our Kind

On one of the first days of 1st grade my teacher wheeled a rickety old movie projector into the room and set it up right in the middle of class. It was time for our curriculum mandated playground safety unit. She loaded a small reel onto it and turned off the lights as the machine began chattering. The movie must have been from the 60's, the color was really washed out and the whole thing was narrated by a very serious sounding man, not to mention the children on screen were all wearing perfect little dresses or white t-shirt/jean combos. The film cut to a profile view of two girls riding on either side of a see-saw. The squeaking of the apparatus grew eerily in intensity as the teeter-totter went up and down, up and down. The man's voice said something like "These two girls are simply enjoying an afternoon at the park, they don't have a thing in the world to worry about. Or so they think." Then the the girls slowly faded and were each replaced by a stack of tea-cups, sitting right where their spines had been. The cups rattled dangerously as the rocking continued. Suddenly, one side crashed down and the tea-cups shattered. The implication was clear, that little girl's vertebrae had just splintered to pieces. "Sally," the voice continued, "would never walk again."

The most disturbing part of all was that I don't believe the movie offered any real guidance on how to avoid such a fate, other than vague generalized warnings about being cautious during playtime, and, I guess, avoiding see-saws at all costs.

And while today I can look back and understand how alarmist and overblown that movie was, the fact remains that it was extraordinarily effective to six year old me for all those same reasons. I was absolutely terrified of see-saws after that, and thought I finally understood why they had removed the old wooden one that used to sit on the edge of our playground just the year before. Even today, some of that stigma still remains. I've probably only ridden one about four times in my life since then, and always while exercising an increased degree of caution. I mean, it may not be the paralysis trap implied in that clip, but it's certainly not the safest of playground based equipment, and part of my thoughts in that regard are still traceable back to that video. The few times I've found myself riding one, I just can't shake that image of the shattering tea-cups out of my head each time I descend.

I'm not writing this to confess or justify my inordinate fear of the teeter-totter though. The point is, that film was very much a product of its era, and the reason it was so startling to me, to the point that I can still vividly remember it 16 years later when 99.5% of first grade is just a haze, is that the fear-mongering style of the movie, the medium through which it was delivered, and the ancient look of it were all so foreign and jarring. How could it fail to be memorable?

Seriously, in this era of elbow pads and participation trophies, who would make or even show a video like that to children today? Even 16 years ago I'm sure some of the parents would have been a little shocked that that was the playground safety clip we were subjected to. And maybe they'd be justified; clearly it screwed with my mind. At the same time though, I'm glad I saw that video, I mean at least back then they knew how to make a lasting impression. Even if it meant scarring impressionable children, at least the kids remembered the lesson. I recall a different movie from that same unit (also ancient and projector based) where a child was killed by a car when his ball rolled into the street: you should have seen how many times my head snapped back and forth before I crossed the street after that. You should see how many times it still does.

This isn't really meant to be an indictment of our increasingly sheltering culture either though. Besides all of that, there's a fun nostalgia factor related to this whole thing. I think it's pretty cool to be able to say I was in one of the last classes to legitimately watch Cold-War era safety films. Today irony is likely the only reason someone would view a movie like that. Even ignoring the particular content, just the fact that we were still watching movies on portable movie reels seems awesome too. This wasn't a singular occurrence either, we probably watched as many movies via projector as we did with the VCR in 1st grade, and I can recall them being utilized even as late as fourth grade, though that time the film tore and we had to abandon the lesson plan.

Think about how archaic that would seem now, to a child of the digital age those reels would be absolute relics, something worthy of a museum, not a classroom. I'm sure even VHS tapes, the bread and butter of our time, are laughably ancient (though still used occasionally I'd wager, where funds haven't come through or newer copies aren't available). Though their demise is less than a decade old, the gigantic gap in quality between VHS tapes and DVDs, a leap so large it will never be matched by any new viewing format to come, just makes video tapes seem way older (and yes, I'm choosing to ignore your raised hand giddy 3-D rep).

And there's the crux of it. Digital technology and the internet have so rapidly and so fundamentally advanced nearly every industry and facet of life, that a six year old today can't even fathom a world without them. That, my good contemporaries, is why we should all feel so blessed. Heck, we probably have it better than anyone. We were born into a world without such amenities. We had childhoods where we never anticipated them, expecting our lives would be at least decently similar in substance, if not style, to our parents'. We learned to entertain ourselves with toys made solely of plastic, learned to always rewind the movie when we were done watching, learned that when a kid wanted to talk to their friends all the time, that meant getting another land-line installed, and learned that if we missed the end of the game, we had to wait until Sports Center was on to learn the score. The first time I remember even hearing about the internet was when I saw an AOL commercial in second grade. We had internet installed the next year, but it was just a novelty, my parents never used it and all I did with it was look at pictures of cool animals. We had it un-installed after six months (before resubscribing a few years later of course).

By the time we were adolescents though, writing research papers and desiring to chat with our friends every night, all those broad-sweeping changes had come in for us to take advantage of and make our lives indescribably easier. We never had to put up with a college experience spent tirelessly scouring through library books for one relevant source. We never had to enter the labor force without working knowledge of a computer. And we never had to worry that just by going to pick up some dinner, we might miss an invitation to a party. What's more, since we actually did spend our formative years without those things, we can truly, genuinely appreciate just how amazing they are. Essentially, we never had to put up with many of the real world difficulties these new technologies solved, but we are just old enough to be aware that those problems indeed existed, and we'd know how to deal with them, or how to entertain ourselves, should some calamity, like a failure of internet service or electricity, befall us.

From a simple historical perspective it's pretty mind blowing. We are the last people on this earth who will even remember what life was like before the internet and digital media forever shaped nearly everything about the way we live.