One of my favorite conversations to have with people that are older than me is to ask them what the greatest changes are that they have witnessed in their lifetime. Predictably, many of the changes revolve around technological advances like air travel, instant communication, and access to information. Truly, we now live in an era where the world is at your fingertips, whereas not too long ago, to have a house wired for electricity in rural areas was considered a luxury.
“What is the biggest change you have witnessed in your lifetime?” I would say the most thought-provoking answer to that question came from my mother.
I asked my mom this question not too long before she passed, and without hesitation she replied, “Oh, definitely news and information.” She was so confident in her response, as though it was so obvious of a change that she didn’t even need to think about it. The decisiveness of her answer is what gave me pause. “News and information is the biggest change I have witnessed in my lifetime.”
My mom was a very well-traveled, well-educated woman who studied abroad to Europe during the 1970s, and earned her Master’s Degree in Germanic Studies with a minor in Communication. She was thoughtful and deliberate in how she interacted with others. To sit and have a conversation with my mom meant that regardless of subject matter, you were the most important person in the world at that moment.
She would talk about how, during her college years in the 1970s, in order to access source material you had to reserve a spot at the library and were allowed a limited amount of time to conduct research. If the local library or university did not have what you were looking for, students would physically travel across the state in order to access information. Imagine writing a paper on, say, the biodiversity of insects and how they interact with native oak trees, and having to drive across the state to access the information, only to be allowed a limited amount of time for research.
And, she was a genuinely kind-hearted soul. My mom was of the Vietnam-era generation and saw many of her high school and college classmates drafted for service overseas. She commented on how a female classmate of hers broke up in cruel “Dear John” style with their boyfriend who had gotten drafted to Vietnam. My mom felt so badly for the young man that she took it upon herself to be his pen pal, writing and sending letters religiously throughout his tour in Vietnam.
During her college years, my mom attended university in Regensburg, Germany for two years. She hitch-hiked around Europe and commented openly about the still-recovering destruction left over from World War II. Outside Berlin, for example, she visited a mountain that featured ski lifts and manufactured snow for high-speed skiing and toboggan runs for wintertime leisure. The mountain, called Teufelsberg or Devil’s Hill, was constructed entirely of rubble from the city following World War II.
And, she was something of a free-spirited rebel. During her college years in Europe, as an American, my mom could move freely from West Berlin to Soviet-controlled East Berlin, where a friend of hers taught Economics at the college level. She giggled at the memory of smuggling banned textbooks to East Berlin to her friend, saying, “I suppose I could have gotten into trouble for that!”
Naturally, I asked her what the textbooks were about. Free markets, entrepreneurialism, capitalism; you know — the type of free-thought concepts not encouraged at the time in Soviet-controlled territories.
She held such a command of the German language, that her first job out of college was to translate technical German into English for the Allis-Chalmers company in Milwaukee. For the rest of her life, she kept regular correspondence with European friends and relatives, hand-writing letters in German that were grammatically, structurally, and stylishly, correct.
So then, when someone like my mother responds with decisive enthusiasm, “Oh definitely news and information!” to the question of the biggest change they have witnessed in their lifetime, we should all sit up and take notice.
She elaborated:
“You have to understand, I grew up with Walter Cronkite. Every evening we would sit down as a family and watch the news, where Walter Cronkite simply read the headlines without commentary. That’s what it was — news and information. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Then, somewhere along the lines somebody figured out that you could make money on the news. So, all of a sudden the news was presented as opinion, with commentary. It’s no longer about news and information. Now you’ve got an entire industry surrounding the simple act of presenting facts, but with commentary and opinion. People are being told how to think, rather than encouraged to think for themselves.”
And then, the clincher:
“Once you understand how much money, power, and influence there is in FEAR, then you’ll understand what I mean when I say news and information is the biggest change I have witnessed in my lifetime.”
— Dan Wegmueller is the owner of Wegmueller Farms and his column appears regularly in the Times. His website is https://www.farmforthought.org.
