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There's an article in today's Globe and Mail that
I wanted to post to the list but, alas, could not find on the website. It
deals with "cutting-edgers", younger (25 to 49) people who are far less
likely to go to church, vote, marry and have children as their parents.
Though well educated, they do not acknowledge or even recognize the importance
of the various social institutions that hold democratic society together.
Their main interests are their personal comfort and well being, networking with
their friends either directly or via the Internet, and the pursuit of
novelty. They have enough money to do these things and to insulate
themselves from what they do not want to see or deal with.
To me, these people represent one of the outcomes
of the growth of the middle class in a liberal democracy. In many ways, a
middle class is a good and necessary thing. Its growth has resulted in a
shift of power from the top downward and thus a decreased possibility of
corporate capital running the show or, as in South America, the generals taking
over. It should, and has, given people enough time to become actively
concerned with politics, the environment and the position of the poor. The
latter concern may be out of noblesse oblige, but that's alright. Good
things come of it anyway.
However, the "cutting-edgers" are
different. The G&M article suggests that there are now very many of
them and that they may even dominate the upper middle class. Politics, the
environment and the poor are of no interest to them, and certainly not of any
interest to their children, whose lives are a computer game. They are like
the Jews of Warsaw, as depicted in "The Pianist", happily isolated from the
storm on the horizon, not even letting themselve think the storm is there.
There is nothing essentially wrong with this except that, when the storm breaks,
they and their world may be swept away.
As a teenager, while working in a pulp and paper
mill, I encountered some of the people who had been swept out of middle class
Europe following World War II, and who had come to Canada as displaced
persons. Among them was a pianist. He may not have been as good as
Szpilman, but he had received a lot of classical training as a child
and young adult. And yes he was Jewish, not from Warsaw, but from
somewhere in Germany. How he escaped the death camps was his story.
He never told it. Mechanically adept, he had landed a job as a millwright
in the pulp mill. In the evening, he would go to the ballroom of the local
hotel and play the piano, largely for himself, but also for the two or three
people, myself included, who would go and listen to him. At the time, I
was no judge of musical aptitude (I'm still not), but his renderings of
Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin were absolutely wonderful (remember, I was only
sixteen at the time !). But what one also noticed was the state of his
hands. Because he had to apply them to wrenches, hammers, chains and other
tools millwrights use, they were gnarled and swollen, and they would often make
mistakes. We didn't mind. We knew his circumstances. And I
don't know if he would ever have become a recognized pianist instead of a good
millwright if his world had not been torn apart, but there was that
possibility.
Is there a moral? I believe it's already
implicit in what I've said above. People who are not aware of their
membership in, and bond to, their society are in danger of losing it. They
can lose it because, like the Jews of Warsaw, they were envied and hated even if
they wouldn't recognize it, or because, as in cases in Latin America, the
generals took over, or because, as in present day Canada, people simply don't
give a damn. And, much like the possibilities and potentialities of
my pianist, so very much may be lost to the world.
Ed Weick
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- RE: [Futurework] ADDENDUM: Local living economies Karen Watters Cole
- Re: [Futurework] ADDENDUM: Local living economies Ray Evans Harrell
- Re: [Futurework] The Pianist Ed Weick
- Re: [Futurework] The Pianist Harry Pollard
- Re: [Futurework] The Pianist Ray Evans Harrell
