Saratoga News
Columns
Point of View
The world is smaller for the younger generation
By Carl Heintze
The other day one of my granddaughters, who is getting married this summer, announced she and her husband-to-be were going to Bali on their honeymoon.
That set me thinking.
On our honeymoon, my wife and I went to Tijuana.
Well, really we only spent part of a day in Mexico on our honeymoon. It was a kind of traveling-post-wedding trip. We meandered down the Southern California coast, visited some friends in San Diego and then spent part of a week in a friend's cabin at Lake Arrowhead.
Use of the cabin was a wedding gift, fortunately, because we didn't have much money to go anywhere.
It definitely was a low-budget honeymoon.
I don't get the impression my granddaughter's honeymoon is going to be like that.
Of course, I realize my honeymoon was half a century or so ago, and the world has changed considerably between the time we got married and when my granddaughter decided to wed.
And it also is something of a shock to realize she's already been around the world once--with her parents when she was a teenager--so finding someplace different in which to spend one's post-nuptials isn't easy.
But I think she, like a good many in her generation, has a different world view than I and my fellows do. As Thomas Friedman likes to tell us, the world is flat. My son jets off to India every couple of months on business. One of my daughters jets off to Las Vegas now and then just for the weekend. Another granddaughter is hoping to spend a semester in Spain next year.
The outer limits of this world is farther, it's bigger, let's say, than Alviso or Milpitas, or even Gilroy.
Still, I have trouble fitting into it. I suppose that's because I grew up believing San Francisco was The City and anything else large was an impossibly long distance away. I am somewhat ashamed to say I never managed to get to Los Angeles until I was in college.
World War II, of course, changed all that. I'd always hoped to spend a summer in Europe when I was in college, but I didn't know it was going to be an autumn, winter, spring and summer and then some, and I wasn't exactly a tourist.
Since then the world has opened up for all of us, but especially for those who are younger. The jet plane managed to shrink things, and between immigration from all over and America's involvement in countries all over the world, we have been granted, willing or not, a global outlook.
Sometimes I wonder if this is good or bad. We have gained a new appreciation of many different kinds of peoples and cultures, but we've also lost the village kind of intimacy I enjoyed when I was growing up.
We don't spend time in front of our houses chatting with neighbors. Often we don't really know much of anything about who lives next door or down around the corner. Our streets usually are empty. Not many people walk just for the pleasure of it. Instead they drive their cars, even two blocks to the store for groceries.
Maybe, as Hillary Clinton alleges, it takes a village to raise a child, but a lot of our children are being raised without one. Instead they are growing up both in the world (taking a honeymoon trip to Bali) and among strangers.
Unfortunately, one can't go back to the village, or at least to the village in which I grew up. It's no longer there. Now it is a city of more than 50,000, plagued with all the things cities of 50,000 are plagued with. One can't go home.
I suppose that sounds pretty much like what it is, an old man grousing. And I know I am old.
But I do often wish I could find a gentler, kinder time in a gentler, kinder and smaller world.
