Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad lived through a tumultuous age. The Great Depression. The World War against totalitarianism. The Korean War. The Vietnam War. Men walking on the moon. Robots walking on Mars. The home computer. The Internet. Antibiotics. Google. Mom has seen enormous changes in technology and in social-cultural life—she thinks children grow up too fast and are exposed to too much media. In Mom's lifetime she's gone from rotary phones and party lines to cell phones that take pictures and provide Internet service, and from the iron range and wood icebox to microwave ovens and refrigerators that have cold water faucets on the outside doors, and from black-and-white television sets with thirteen stations to high-definition flat screens with hundreds of stations, and from a hand-scrubbed world of washboards and wringers to a push-button electronic world where everyone is connected to everyone and where every last scrap of information flows instantaneously at the touch of a finger. In Mom's lifetime she's gone from Jim Crow and racial violence to a country that elected a black man as president, and from the inequality of the sexes to a country where women are in positions of power, and from a world of polite manners and civil discourse to a world where the foulest language is heard and where children think nothing of standing up to adults and telling them where to go, and from a world where the priest and the local politician lorded over everyone to a world where authority in every order and guise has been scattered to smithereens.