WHAT CHANGES TIME HAS WROUGHT

I have been thinking lately of how life has changed since my childhood some three score and eighteen years ago. Many changes...high speed travel via jet supersonic planes, expansion of worldwide human contact via television and the Internet, the explosion of many social constraints, and more...are readily visible and significant. But what is of interest to me is a much greater subtle change that has taken place, a consuming change with seemingly endless manifestations and Earth-shaking effects .

It is thet transformation of the world from a mind-centered, contemplative, spiritual focus to that of a body centered, physical, sexual one.

Think of learning. When I was a child, studying the ways of ancient tribes and peoples was of interest in and of itself. We wanted to know all we could about those that had come before us...they were our ancestors, our history. And we wanted to know about their lives and the civilizations they had created not because it would help us to get a job and make more money and acquire more things... but to fill a hunger we had in our minds to learn all we could about precious life and the beautiful world we lived in. The payoff for knowledge was in our souls not our pocketbooks.

Human virtues of honor and respect and compassion and benevolence and honesty and justice were of paramount value because each individual life was of paramount importance. We cared that others were well. We stooped to lend a helping hand. We smiled in recognition of those we passed on the street --recognition that the glory of human life related us. And whether one believed a god had created all life, or not, was not the issue. Human life was considered to be holy, in its secular meaning of worthy of devotion and respect.

And because of that, we dealt with each other differently. We talked with each other. We wrote letters to each other. Telephones were answered by humans, not machines. And we listened. What other people knew was something that we might benefit from knowing, what other people believed might be worth our considering.

The music we enjoyed was mostly soft and melodic, with words that expressed feelings of tenderness and beauty. The dances we danced were joyful and loving. Today, the music is blaring, raucous, with words of anger and unrest. The dances are sexually explicit gyrations meant to provoke and inflame. The physical rules.

We know why the use of drugs in our society is rampant. It is because the quick temporary physical fix drugs may offer is seen as of greater import than the inevitable long term mental anguish and despair the drugs bring with them. The physical outscores the mental.

Success in life in the past was measured by how well a life had been lived...how honorably and nobly and humanely a life had been lived. Wealth and celebrity and power were not the measure of a man, as they are today. The size of his heart was!

I forever believe that what distinguishes us from all else is our minds and our souls. They are deserving of primacy in our lives. Again.