Parting Thoughts

In an e-mail to my father the other day, I vented about the stress of the coming two weeks –the tests, the papers, and the misery. His instantaneous reply was calming, a bit frustrating, and full of typical fatherly advice. “Son,” he typed, “let me remind you again of the words of the great John Wooden: ‘failing to prepare…’ “

I had heard this one a million times and finished the adage in my head: “is preparing to fail”.

I’ve been fond of this quote since the first time he recited it to me a few summers ago. I was in relentless pursuit of my college hockey dreams and paying the price to make them become a reality. How true it is, I thought to myself, that proper preparation brings you peace of mind.

Recently though, I’ve started to question the sage advice of the aging Coach Wooden. Could it be that in our present day and age of extreme convenience that hard work and preparation no longer carry the clout they used to? It seems that society today is overrun with shortcuts brought to us by new technologies. Students can now write a twenty-five page research paper in the time it used to take someone to obtain enough research material to write five; singers are voted to superstardom via text message voting on television shows; professional athletes use performance enhancing drugs and hit 73 home runs in a season.

Don’t get me wrong, technology is a wonderful thing. With advancements in pharmaceuticals, millions of lives are saved; Third World countries are pulled from the rungs of poverty; I’m able to maintain close relationships with my family and friends despite being thousands of miles away from them.

The problem is not that technology is advancing at a chaotic rate; it’s that society thinks it can keep up. Many of us, indulging in the age of convenience, feel smarter, more talented, and stronger than we actually are. My concern is that this will be met with complete and utter disillusionment.

Then again, there is some likelihood that we have past the point of no return. Can we be “saved,” and do we even want to be? Is this where fate has brought us? What is more important, more valuable –the minds creating and using new technology or the technology itself?

One thing is certain: we have to prepare for the coming changes accordingly. A professor once told me, “when it comes to planning let’s remember Noah –it wasn’t raining when he built the ark”. It may not have been raining, but there was a premonition of disaster, and the same is potentially true for the current state of culture and societal values. We know that we are undergoing immense change, though we are not yet sure if it is for worse or for better. Let’s err on the side of caution and prepare for the worse. Let’s visualize for the future and make use of the very tools responsible for “dumbing down” our culture to make it wiser and smarter. Let’s pursue Lee Siegel’s idealism of joining human nature and technology in matrimony.

-BA