There is almost nothing that cannot be found on the Internet these days. Almost no question that can’t be answered in a minute or two.
To prove the above statement, I will ask a few random questions, and see how long it takes me to find the answers. What was Abraham Lincoln’s father’s name? Thomas. That took me 40 seconds. (And I fumbled over the keyboard, at that.) Who was the first European to see Australia? In 1606, Spanish navigator Luis Vaez de Torres sailed through the strait that bears his name. About a minute. Who invented the ball point pen? John Loud, in 1888. How many varieties of apples are there in the world? About 7,500.
How many saints are there? More than 10,000. (When I’m gone from this sphere, there will be 10,001).
[the_ad_placement id=”top-of-page”]
I’m not the fastest guy with the Internet, but this all came to me in less than seven minutes, and I would have been done sooner if I hadn’t gotten interested in the saints and started reading about them (wondering how I might be able to make the list. Turns out I have to die first so I am procrastinating again).
I mention this to illustrate something that is becoming clearer to me all the time. My children are growing up in a vastly different world than the one I knew when I was their age and as a result, they will be different people from me and my generation. If knowledge is power, then I guess they will be more empowered. If ignorance breeds fear, then perhaps they’ll be less fearful. At the same time, if ignorance is bliss, maybe they’ll be less blissful.
My chances of finding out the name of President Lincoln’s father when I was a kid in the ’50s were not too good. It would have taken me considerably longer than 40 seconds. We had no encyclopedias in our farmhouse and the “library” at my one-room school consisted of a cupboard full of a hundred books or so. On my infrequent trips to the town of Mitchell for haircuts, there wasn’t much time to duck over to the library to search out the name of Abe’s papa. And there weren’t too many people around for me to ask. My teacher might have been able to find the answer. I could have asked my older brother and sisters to check it out at high school. But we’re talking days, weeks, months not seconds. (You say, why didn’t I just take a train to Washington and ask Abe myself. Ha, ha and one extra ha! You think I’m that old, eh. Well, joke’s on you. There was no train back then from Stratford to Washington.)
My Dad was my Internet. A lot of my online time was spent leaning on the handle of a hayfork upstairs in the barn after the cattle had been fed. Sometimes we’d do a two-hour Q & A while practically freezing stiff in the cold. My mother sometimes wondered if we’d been trampled to death in the stables below.
To me, my father was the smartest man in the world. But, of course, I know now that he wasn’t. Today, any 10-year-old kid with a laptop could download twice as much as Dad ever knew in the time it took us to fork down enough hay to feed our hungry herd. However, he read books voraciously and acquired not just information, but knowledge. As well as wisdom. And that’s why I loved listening to his answers.
The best book I’ve ever read was an old biography of Honest Abe that I picked up somewhere. I remember lying on a couch for several nights in a row and being completely absorbed in it. There was no high-speed in those days. And yet, we grew up knowing our right hand from our left.
And the names of a lot of saints.
There already is a St. James, isn’t there?
Look it up for me. Would you mind?
©2005 Jim Hagarty
[the_ad_placement id=”top-of-page”]
