Point of View
Dreams of progress have become nightmares
By Carl Heintze
Somebody, I think it was the British comedian, John Cleese, used to talk about "the end of civilization, as we know it."
Lately, I've been wondering if his prophecy is about to happen.
We're running out of electricity. We can't build highways as fast as we build new cars. We can't find a cure for AIDS, which is ravaging Africa and Asia. Gasoline prices are going through the stratosphere.
Diversity, not unity, has become so politically correct that difference, not commonality, has become the slogan of the state and nation.
The Internet, once touted as the dawning of a new age, while not exactly dying, sure isn't what it once was. And Silicon Valley , where excess was everything, from salaries to real estate prices, from lattes to Mercedes, actually has seen a decline in home sales and, if not a decrease, at least, a leveling off of rents.
What are we coming to?
Can it be that we may once again find affordable housing, store clerks who actually know where things are in the store, freeways that are really free of most cars and just plain old regular coffee, unembellished by frothed milk and dusted with cinnamon?
Will it be that Starbucks, occasionally, will close, instead of opening on every street corner, that the proliferating numbers of cell phones, cell-phone sales people and cell-phone ads will actually decline in number?
That we won't have to figure how many minutes we are getting for how many dollars, free phones and other gimmicks? That stock options will not only be worthless, but a thing of the past?
That the NASDAQ, having descended from heaven, as it were, will once again approach reality?
That jeans and T-shirts no longer will be a way of life at work?
That Venture Capital (in capital letters) will no longer venture forth for anything, except solid business opportunities. That monster houses with 4,000 square feet, two and three stories, multiple-car garages (filled with multiple BMWs) and at-home hired mentors to get offspring into Ivy League colleges will become a part of recent past history.
If so, it is a decline in civilization devoutly to be sought.
We have, so it seems to me, anyway, lived through a time of excess--a time when the emphasis on making money, on self, on the denial of poverty has been the overriding theme of where we live; when we often seemed to have forgotten the virtues of the past in pursuit of the illusions of a future which seemed never to quite arrive and, fortunately, which may now never come.
Perhaps, instead, it will come to pass that the valley in which some of us grew and which was once known as one of Heart's Delight may shed its silicon wafers for a more natural environment; that we may all may yet awaken from a dream which has become a nightmare; and that reality may break out where illusion was rampant.
I think all this is possible, simply because the one thing in life that remains permanent is change.
When the computer age suddenly descended upon us, it came more or less unannounced, without warning and without the chance to guide its effects.
I can remember when the Internet was text-only driven; when the Internet was known only to those in government and academia; when hand held calculators seemed about as far as the digital revolution was going to go.
It was a time when California had plenty of power, both gas and electric, when it seemed there were no limits, only possibilities, and when space was an exciting frontier and not the new tourists' province.
Then, we were not many, but part of a common population. We did not seek to exploit those things which made us different, but were proud of those which brought us together. We did not feel either invaded or defensive, but part of a land which welcomed others openly, no matter who they were.
Memory, of course, always brightens the colors and dims disasters. If this is true, perhaps, one day we will look back on the days when Silicon Valley surrounded us as the good old days.
But I do not personally think so.
I do not think I will ever hanker for a time when I did not willingly go out of my house before nine o'clock in the morning, or after three in the afternoon, simply because there were too many cars and people; when I could not have moved to another house if I wanted to do so--I simply could not afford it--when I wondered at the dozens of jeans-clad young people who seemed to have nothing to do but drink lattes in the middle of the day and talk to someone, out there somewhere on their cell phones.
If that civilization--the civilization we know now--is waning I can only applaud.
And drink a plain regular cup of black coffee.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
