It’s a Mystery

Things change. There seems to be a fundamental truth to this two-word phrase. Perhaps another truth is we passionately resist change.

Or perhaps it is just those of us of a certain age. I don‚t know but I do wonder.

I watch my grandchildren embrace technology so seamlessly. I can use my iPhone but I don‚t really understand it. I watch cable television and stream other programs. 1883 motivated me.

“Grandpa, you should think about going to just streaming.” My perceptions of my own ineptness leave me quaking in my boots.

I get the how but not the why. Maybe I just don‚t like what I don‚t believe I can fix. I was having a conversation with a young man who is an automobile mechanic. He assured me that the days when I could set a carburetor with a screwdriver were not coming back.

Thank God attaching rib pads to shoulder pads can still be done with a screwdriver. Wait a minute. Let me look. What do you mean I should watch a YouTube video? On my iPhone?

I had a Priest friend who dealt with a number of young people. Adolescents being adolescents the youth enjoyed asking rather challenging questions concerning elements of Christian theology. You know, questions where they think they have you.

Ask any adolescent if there is anything more fun than engaging a parent or a teacher in a game of intellectual whack-a-mole.

When presented with such a question, this religious scholar would adopt his stoic expression and respond, “It‚s a mystery.”

I often thought he must have been tempted to add things like, “Tell me what you think” or “Why don‚t you go think about it.” But it seems he simply left it to the student to discern.

Now, I‚m not suggesting there is a religious quality to the technologies that seem to fill our lives. There isn‚t despite the fact that some folks seem to be walking about holding their devices before them in a most prayful manner.

In a recent Just Thinkin‚ I quoted Henry Drummond‚s wise lines on the price of technology from Inherit the Wind. Technology does have a cost. One of the most recent costs has been leveled on our print media. The Tulsa World has again had to decrease the size of its comic section. The comic section has been reduced to half a page and in the shuffle, Dennis the Menace was lost.

As with many things related to newspapers, I have an emotional attachment to Dennis the Menace. Right up to her death and long past his, my mother always saw my brother in Dennis. Reading this comic seemed to provide her with a fond reconnection to my brother, she waited for this cartoon each morning. She‚d read it to you before you could get the orange juice down.

I don‚t like this change. But it is not a mystery. The only mystery in life is why the kamikaze pilots wore helmets – Al McGuire

Hal McBride writes a column, Just Thinkin‚, published each week.