Temporal Whiplash

Every once in a while we are struck by how things have changed.

And every once in an other while we are struck by how they stay the same.

This week we got temporal whiplash.

It started off from a phone call from our son.

He had just finished a patrol on the West Bank with his squad in the Israeli Army and he wanted to wish us a Happy Holiday (we will get to that later).

After we said our good byes, we remarked how truly wonderful it was to live today.

When we were in his shoes 30 years ago, phoning home meant a tank ride to Beirut and usually a fire fight with Syrian Army regulars.

We did not phone home much.

Now we can reach out and touch our loved ones anywhere in the world immediately.

Kind of cool isn’t it?

And yet some things are still the same or have gone back to being the same.

Once again the speed limit to Salt Lake is a sane and reasonable 80 mph, just like it was the year before we got our first driver’s license.

Call us self centered but we secretly believed that whole 55 mph limit was not to save gas or lives but to mess with us personally. (To be honest we have seen how we drive and they might have a point.)

Then again we celebrate the birth of our dear friend Jamey Richardson’s first grandchild. First for her but babies have been born and celebrated since before the dawn of civilization.

A bit of the old and the new at the same time.

Which gets us back sort to our spate of holidays, the Jewish High Holy Days. We knew it would be difficult when we got our calender last year and noticed that almost every one fell mid week this year in September. Which means that out of the 21 working days of the month we only could work on 13 of them and had to publish our paper early three weeks out of four.

We keep them because our ancestors kept them so that too is a bit of new and old and the same time new.

Until 150 years ago our ancestors lived pretty much the same lives. Apart from a mass migration every 700 years or so most people were born, lived and died in the same village their parents lived and their parents lived before them.

At the very most the average person might have traveled just 50 miles in his entire lifetime.

While boring there was something to be said for this pedestrian life. Always surrounded by family and friends most men and women were never alone or lonely or far from home.

That all change first with steamships and trains and then airplanes and automobiles.

Even the poorest could travel distances unthinkable a generation or two before.

And we became a world full of strangers.

That was until facebook.

Staying connected with family and friends is as effortless today as it was 200 years ago.

The more things change.