In my guise as the list Pollyanna, I must say your comments are not welcome - because they are likely to be true.
A good analysis - but not a happy one.
Harry
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Ed wrote:
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
**************************************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: (818) 352-4141 -- Fax: (818) 353-2242 http://home.attbi.com/~haledward ****************************************************
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