I am sometimes amazed that my generation ever made it to adulthood. We certainly lived a dangerous life by today’s standards. We rode around on our bicycles without helmets, we slid around in the back of station wagons without seat belts as our parental drivers turned corners, and we chased after trucks spraying the neighborhood for mosquitoes, letting the white chemical fog emerging from the back of the truck engulf us. But the realization that mankind does not ever really know what he is doing with ‘modern’ inventions came to me while watching a recent antique show on TV. To the laughter of the modern stars of the show, a device was shown that was very familiar to me as it was a staple of the shoe stores of my youth. At the time, I loved the machine and thought it very cool. One slid one’s foot into a hole at floor level and then looked down through a scope that illuminated the foot while indicating what shoe size was appropriate. The only problem with this, according to the modern show hosts, was that the illumination was done by x-ray and was actually harmful to those who used the machine too often.
Is that not always the way with modern inventions? My generation was first brought to think about the importance of our environment by the book, The Silent Spring, by Rachael Carson. One of the substances she railed against in the book was the insecticide DDT. Yet, at its inception it was used in the Pacific during World War II, where its introduction was considered miraculous to the Marines fighting their way across the Pacific towards Japan as it eliminated the insects that made their lives, their medical tents, and even their food a nightmare.
It makes one wonder what modern invention, which currently promises to be a salvation to humanity, will be discovered instead to be a detriment in the years to come. And more importantly, to us of a certain age, what part of our youth that we still think indispensable will no longer be relevant. Perhaps relinquishing the past, in the face of the new, may be harder than we think.