Re: THE SEVENTEEN TRADITIONS, by Ralph Nader
Posted: Wed Oct 30, 2013 2:44 am
9. The Tradition of Simple Enjoyments
Ask yourself, when do you laugh the hardest and the longest? When you're watching a situation comedy, a reality show, or a comic on late-night TV -- or when you find yourself in hilarious situations with friends or family? No contest. Those bellyaching laughs come faster, and last longer, when you're with friends or family. The television shows are part of the market-driven manufacturing of laughter. Friends and family are a gift, and those personal relationships engender deeper, more truthful mirth.
We grew up in an environment of simple enjoyments, a world largely separate from market entertainment and almost wholly diverted by family entertainment. The ways we enjoyed ourselves might appear impossibly quaint to today's youth, who've grown used to nonstop commercial entertainment so fast-paced that anything slower is greeted as BO-RING. Theirs is a video-audio, sensualized, commodified world that has displaced simple homemade pleasures, driving them down the rungs of attraction so that only the youngest children are expected to embrace them.
In our town there was one movie theater, the Strand. It had Saturday matinees for children, and we were allowed to go to the movies about twice a year. More often we headed to the Soldiers' Monument grounds, where we ate delicious sandwiches while feeling the coolness of the stone seats on our legs during a hot summer day. On Sunday afternoons we took our bikes on exhilarating rides down the tree-lined road to the nearby village of Colebrook. I can still feel the thrill of the breeze as we cruised down the long hill on our way home. Roller-skating on a neighborhood sidewalk was perfect for sunny days, but the rain didn't stop us: We just headed downstairs and skated in our basement. I even shot basketballs in that cool basement, into a bottomless apple basket hung on the staircase.
Our daily lives were full of these simple pleasures, no matter how old we were or what time of year it was. Running up to the garden to pick tomatoes or squash or beans, then back into the house to help prepare them for dinner, made us little ones feel we were part of a big act. Climbing up the venerable apple tree was a blast, and plucking the insect-scarred apples left us with small but very juicy bites. (Nobody had to tell us the apples were "organic"!) Just the thought of eating Mother's homemade pastries, whose aroma wafted from the oven to the kitchen table, made our mouths water.
Winter brought the crunch of a white Christmas, even as we walked to midnight service, at the Episcopal Church. Mother would take us outdoors and teach us the alphabet by carving letters in the snow. As we grew older, we sledded to school on snowy mornings. Then, come Easter time, my mother would hard-boil dozens of eggs with onion skins, staining them dark red. After they were all hidden, we would go running around finding them -- and then compete to see which egg would survive what we called the "cracking competition." Each of us would make a wish, and then crack our egg up against one of our siblings' eggs. We looked forward to the cracking competition for weeks.
Summers were an exciting time; we all looked forward to a change of pace. When we were little children, Dad would take us up to Highland Lake, where we'd go driving over the spillways between the lake and the spill of water down the valley into the Mad River, cruising through half a foot of moving water. "Wheee!" we'd cry. "Turn around and do it again, Dad!" Then he would take us up to Crystal Lake, the bucolic town reservoir, where we would look out over the water with a kind of reverence. Coming from the Middle East, where water is scarce and deserts plentiful, our parents taught us to view abundant clean water with gratitude.
We spent our summer vacations with our Aunt Adele, my mother's older sister, and her six children. She and her husband, Selim, lived in Toronto, Canada, and we alternated summers with her family, spending one summer in Connecticut, the next in Canada. Our age-matched cousins were like another set of brothers and sisters, and our aunt and uncle stepped in as surrogate parents. Our families were not only extended but amplified by the sheer variety of personality and experience our cousins brought to the mix. Their lives were different from ours in a hundred small ways: They wore school uniforms and we did not, followed hockey where we followed baseball, pronounced English words differently -- and such differences made for endless hours of fun and argument.
Though our parents had ten children crammed into our relatively medium-sized house during those summers, I never remember hearing the mothers complaining about the extra work, or even saying they felt especially tired. The older children helped them with the cooking and cleaning chores. And having two sets of parents certainly helped preserve order: When it came to being disciplined or taking instructions, we listened to and obeyed our aunt and uncle as surely as we did our own parents.
Our house had a screened-in porch upstairs, with room for three or four beds in summer, another memorable setting in our childhood landscape. Even the children of the next generation, beginning with my sister Laura's children, always relished the chance to sleep on the exalted porch. It was seen as a first-class treat. At night we could hear the crickets, see the stars and the moon and the clouds, tell stories, engage in horseplay, laugh, while my mother and her sister were visiting downstairs, entertaining each other with their own stories of childhood, and news from home. They would tease each other, and the gales of laughter would come wafting through the windows. Now and then, when it sounded as though we were getting too boisterous up on the porch, one of the sisters downstairs would say, "That's enough, children. Go to sleep." That would usually quiet us down -- but not always. Then they had to come up to the porch to enforce this point.
Our mother and aunt each felt free to compliment or admonish any of us as they saw fit, and this had the effect of reinforcing many of our family's traditions. Whenever we came to them to settle a conflict that cropped up among us, they were both equally likely to offer up one of the sayings they learned together in childhood: "It doesn't hurt to be generous," or "Don't judge until you know the whole story," or "If someone does you harm, do him some good" -- advice we'd all find useful throughout life, and all passed along in a way that was memorable, short, and sweet.
When it was our turn to travel to Canada, we usually joined Aunt Adele's family in a cottage on Lake Simcoe or Lake Couchiching. The routine would be less varied than when we were together in town. But those weeks we spent together were more attuned to nature. They were shaped by our closeness to the water, by afternoons spent swimming on a beachfront just down from the cottage, by boating, fishing, hiking, picking berries, games of hide and seek in the woods. My mother and her sister knew how to delegate responsibility to the older children, trusting our older cousins to keep an eye on us when we went to amusement parks in Toronto.
As we grew up and went to college, these joint summer vacations became less frequent. But we all remember them fondly, and in the 1980s Shaf organized several summers with our cousins and their families at Georgian Bay, so that a new generation of children could get to know each other in the setting that had meant so much to us when we were youngsters.
Amid all this, though, I must confess that there was one commercial enjoyment I never tired of -- one that lasted well into my teen years. That was taking an early morning train from Winsted down the Naugatuck Valley into Grand Central Station, and then transferring onto the subway to Yankee Stadium to watch my favorite team clobber the opposition, especially the Boston Red Sox. You see, our town was divided right down the middle, half being Yankee fans and the other half being patient Red Sox fans. My boyhood hero Lou Gehrig, the "Iron Man," had recently retired from the Bronx Bombers, but he was still fresh in everyone's memory, particularly after his tragic illness. Returning from a ball game at Yankee Stadium meant hours of banter, joshing, and tireless arguments with the misguided Red Sox fans in the neighborhood.
Of course, all these and innumerable other simple pleasures are available to many youngsters today. But the screens and earphones are taking over -- the video games and iPods and television and all kinds of salacious websites. The only electric distraction we had was the radio, and that was offered to us as a reward, not surrendered to our control as a daily routine. Instead we contented ourselves playing kick-the-can in the backyard, or hitting fungo balls to each other on the sandlot baseball field, playing marbles, or hiking along streams in the woods. It was certainly cheaper than the ceaseless parade of gadgets parents are obliged to purchase today, and you could play the same game again and again without being bored or demanding an upgrade.
There was something about playing with the same building blocks that invited encore after encore. What was that something? My guess is that it was the fact that we were interacting with other human beings, not with machines. We were tapping into the infinite richness of human senses and emotions, challenging our imagination and human competitiveness, rather than the staccato rhythms and predictable rewards of preprogrammed games. This blend of the familiar and the surprising gave us all the joyful feeling that we were making our own pleasure -- not relying on structured "playdates," but having our own fun.
Ask yourself, when do you laugh the hardest and the longest? When you're watching a situation comedy, a reality show, or a comic on late-night TV -- or when you find yourself in hilarious situations with friends or family? No contest. Those bellyaching laughs come faster, and last longer, when you're with friends or family. The television shows are part of the market-driven manufacturing of laughter. Friends and family are a gift, and those personal relationships engender deeper, more truthful mirth.
We grew up in an environment of simple enjoyments, a world largely separate from market entertainment and almost wholly diverted by family entertainment. The ways we enjoyed ourselves might appear impossibly quaint to today's youth, who've grown used to nonstop commercial entertainment so fast-paced that anything slower is greeted as BO-RING. Theirs is a video-audio, sensualized, commodified world that has displaced simple homemade pleasures, driving them down the rungs of attraction so that only the youngest children are expected to embrace them.
In our town there was one movie theater, the Strand. It had Saturday matinees for children, and we were allowed to go to the movies about twice a year. More often we headed to the Soldiers' Monument grounds, where we ate delicious sandwiches while feeling the coolness of the stone seats on our legs during a hot summer day. On Sunday afternoons we took our bikes on exhilarating rides down the tree-lined road to the nearby village of Colebrook. I can still feel the thrill of the breeze as we cruised down the long hill on our way home. Roller-skating on a neighborhood sidewalk was perfect for sunny days, but the rain didn't stop us: We just headed downstairs and skated in our basement. I even shot basketballs in that cool basement, into a bottomless apple basket hung on the staircase.
Our daily lives were full of these simple pleasures, no matter how old we were or what time of year it was. Running up to the garden to pick tomatoes or squash or beans, then back into the house to help prepare them for dinner, made us little ones feel we were part of a big act. Climbing up the venerable apple tree was a blast, and plucking the insect-scarred apples left us with small but very juicy bites. (Nobody had to tell us the apples were "organic"!) Just the thought of eating Mother's homemade pastries, whose aroma wafted from the oven to the kitchen table, made our mouths water.
Winter brought the crunch of a white Christmas, even as we walked to midnight service, at the Episcopal Church. Mother would take us outdoors and teach us the alphabet by carving letters in the snow. As we grew older, we sledded to school on snowy mornings. Then, come Easter time, my mother would hard-boil dozens of eggs with onion skins, staining them dark red. After they were all hidden, we would go running around finding them -- and then compete to see which egg would survive what we called the "cracking competition." Each of us would make a wish, and then crack our egg up against one of our siblings' eggs. We looked forward to the cracking competition for weeks.
Summers were an exciting time; we all looked forward to a change of pace. When we were little children, Dad would take us up to Highland Lake, where we'd go driving over the spillways between the lake and the spill of water down the valley into the Mad River, cruising through half a foot of moving water. "Wheee!" we'd cry. "Turn around and do it again, Dad!" Then he would take us up to Crystal Lake, the bucolic town reservoir, where we would look out over the water with a kind of reverence. Coming from the Middle East, where water is scarce and deserts plentiful, our parents taught us to view abundant clean water with gratitude.
We spent our summer vacations with our Aunt Adele, my mother's older sister, and her six children. She and her husband, Selim, lived in Toronto, Canada, and we alternated summers with her family, spending one summer in Connecticut, the next in Canada. Our age-matched cousins were like another set of brothers and sisters, and our aunt and uncle stepped in as surrogate parents. Our families were not only extended but amplified by the sheer variety of personality and experience our cousins brought to the mix. Their lives were different from ours in a hundred small ways: They wore school uniforms and we did not, followed hockey where we followed baseball, pronounced English words differently -- and such differences made for endless hours of fun and argument.
Though our parents had ten children crammed into our relatively medium-sized house during those summers, I never remember hearing the mothers complaining about the extra work, or even saying they felt especially tired. The older children helped them with the cooking and cleaning chores. And having two sets of parents certainly helped preserve order: When it came to being disciplined or taking instructions, we listened to and obeyed our aunt and uncle as surely as we did our own parents.
Our house had a screened-in porch upstairs, with room for three or four beds in summer, another memorable setting in our childhood landscape. Even the children of the next generation, beginning with my sister Laura's children, always relished the chance to sleep on the exalted porch. It was seen as a first-class treat. At night we could hear the crickets, see the stars and the moon and the clouds, tell stories, engage in horseplay, laugh, while my mother and her sister were visiting downstairs, entertaining each other with their own stories of childhood, and news from home. They would tease each other, and the gales of laughter would come wafting through the windows. Now and then, when it sounded as though we were getting too boisterous up on the porch, one of the sisters downstairs would say, "That's enough, children. Go to sleep." That would usually quiet us down -- but not always. Then they had to come up to the porch to enforce this point.
Our mother and aunt each felt free to compliment or admonish any of us as they saw fit, and this had the effect of reinforcing many of our family's traditions. Whenever we came to them to settle a conflict that cropped up among us, they were both equally likely to offer up one of the sayings they learned together in childhood: "It doesn't hurt to be generous," or "Don't judge until you know the whole story," or "If someone does you harm, do him some good" -- advice we'd all find useful throughout life, and all passed along in a way that was memorable, short, and sweet.
When it was our turn to travel to Canada, we usually joined Aunt Adele's family in a cottage on Lake Simcoe or Lake Couchiching. The routine would be less varied than when we were together in town. But those weeks we spent together were more attuned to nature. They were shaped by our closeness to the water, by afternoons spent swimming on a beachfront just down from the cottage, by boating, fishing, hiking, picking berries, games of hide and seek in the woods. My mother and her sister knew how to delegate responsibility to the older children, trusting our older cousins to keep an eye on us when we went to amusement parks in Toronto.
As we grew up and went to college, these joint summer vacations became less frequent. But we all remember them fondly, and in the 1980s Shaf organized several summers with our cousins and their families at Georgian Bay, so that a new generation of children could get to know each other in the setting that had meant so much to us when we were youngsters.
Amid all this, though, I must confess that there was one commercial enjoyment I never tired of -- one that lasted well into my teen years. That was taking an early morning train from Winsted down the Naugatuck Valley into Grand Central Station, and then transferring onto the subway to Yankee Stadium to watch my favorite team clobber the opposition, especially the Boston Red Sox. You see, our town was divided right down the middle, half being Yankee fans and the other half being patient Red Sox fans. My boyhood hero Lou Gehrig, the "Iron Man," had recently retired from the Bronx Bombers, but he was still fresh in everyone's memory, particularly after his tragic illness. Returning from a ball game at Yankee Stadium meant hours of banter, joshing, and tireless arguments with the misguided Red Sox fans in the neighborhood.
Of course, all these and innumerable other simple pleasures are available to many youngsters today. But the screens and earphones are taking over -- the video games and iPods and television and all kinds of salacious websites. The only electric distraction we had was the radio, and that was offered to us as a reward, not surrendered to our control as a daily routine. Instead we contented ourselves playing kick-the-can in the backyard, or hitting fungo balls to each other on the sandlot baseball field, playing marbles, or hiking along streams in the woods. It was certainly cheaper than the ceaseless parade of gadgets parents are obliged to purchase today, and you could play the same game again and again without being bored or demanding an upgrade.
There was something about playing with the same building blocks that invited encore after encore. What was that something? My guess is that it was the fact that we were interacting with other human beings, not with machines. We were tapping into the infinite richness of human senses and emotions, challenging our imagination and human competitiveness, rather than the staccato rhythms and predictable rewards of preprogrammed games. This blend of the familiar and the surprising gave us all the joyful feeling that we were making our own pleasure -- not relying on structured "playdates," but having our own fun.