How cellphones are sucking the life out of a generation, if not the world | Opinion
I’ve been at Mama’s house all week.
She took to the bed right after her 94th birthday, more than a year ago. She’s low on energy, but her spirits are good. In years gone by she would have laughed, saying, “My get up and go just got up and went.”
My sister and her son stay with her, and hospice folks and a preacher come regularly. They’re wonderful people.
Mama opens piles of junk mail, and sometimes works crossword puzzles. She watches the local TV news daily, the national news, “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!” If you open your window at that time of day, you can probably hear her TV.
Of all the things that could have meant something to her this week, she asked me if I’d heard that Willie Mays died.
And when we had a long conversation about her life, she latched onto another current event: states and school districts trying to keep students from using and abusing cellphones during instruction.
South Carolina’s pending budget includes a provision that will ban cellphones in K-12 schools statewide. The state Board of Education will decide how to implement it.
Mama was born in October 1928 in the living room of the old farm house that burned.
Her mother had come from Atlanta to have the baby on the farm where she was reared in the suburban sprawl of Wrens, or actually Zebina, Georgia. It’s where Mama lives today.
Mama was born with the umbilical cord around her neck. She was blue, and the doctor set her aside as a stillbirth when her grandmother took charge: “You take care of that baby and get it to breathe and I’ll take care of Lois (Mama’s mother).”
“They were forceful women,” Mama said.
Mama walked to elementary school and junior high in Atlanta. She said a sweet older policeman helped them cross busy Highland and Virginia Avenues.
Later they rode the “Girls High Special” bus to school. When it went down a steep hill the girls all sang out “ ‘Hi-Yooooooooooooo’ and held that until we hit a bump at the bottom and then said ‘Silver!’ ”
“We didn’t have to carry our entertainment with us,” she said. “We made our own fun.”
She thinks “those things they carry around and click on” are sucking the life out of children. “I don’t see how children learn to have any creativity,” she said. “I think they’ve about done away with creativity that comes naturally in a child.”
In her childhood, no cellphone was involved when her Grandpa sparked creativity with a funny old song. After supper, he’d take the oil lamp and put it on a little table by the front door. One or two of his grandchildren would hop in his lap and he’d sing a song about a jay bird on a hickory limb that got whooping cough and he whooped and coughed until he whooped his head right off.
With all that walking to school, children weren’t burdened with book bags, backpacks or fanny packs. They didn’t take books home. “We worked hard when we were at school, but we weren’t expected to study the rest of the day,” Mama said.
Her creativity has shown all her life, as editor of the high school and college newspapers, as a singer, teacher, gardener, great cook, story teller, an entrepreneur, writer, genealogist, hostess when the cupboard was bare, and a painter of watercolors and oils.
Media was important in the dark ages, but it did not consume them. They listened to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats on the radio. They read the Atlanta Journal. They saw newsreels about World War II at the Shirley Temple movies.
Mama recalled the day World War II ended. It became a holiday, and she spent much of it with a young man in the neighborhood whose brother was a prisoner of war in Japan. He didn’t say much. That brother died on the ship on the way home.
“It was a hard time,” Mama said.
The world is different now. But let’s not think our kids face burdens so heavy they can’t put a phone down.
David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.
