Getting Lost

Every ten years or so, my family scrounged up the resources, traveled the short distance to Tattersalls Books next to the Bruno's store in Conyers and bought the latest edition of the Atlanta Metro Map book. About $100, 300 pages of maps, roads twisting from page to page, zip codes, rivers, the imagination running wild as to what was actually on those streets. What landmarks made the road builders make Atlanta's streets as they did, curved and hilly, with no seeming reason as to their existence? And we could travel down the myriad of Flat Shoals Roads or Peachtrees until we no longer knew where we were, or mistaken Ronald Reagan Blvd. for Ronald Reagan Parkway (which I have done) and wound up at a dead end late at night, with only the lights of the billboards to show us home. That's why the Map book was so necessary. It was our guide, our lifejacket in the middle of paths that went absolutely everywhere. But, of course, this was before the days of readily available internet connections, before Technopoly took over even these corners of our lives.

Last week I went with the Friends of the Nancy Guinn Library (Conyers, Georgia) to the FOGL conference in Cumming. It was my first trip in a car with a GPS system. It also strengthened my resolve never to purchase one of those for my car. It infuriated me, the logical ability it had to get the van (and it's driver) from one place to another. Because I, for one, want to get lost.

When I was little, I would be in the car with my mother, and we'd be going to the store, or to some doctor appointment. I'd look out and see roads going parallel, across, and away from me. I saw the houses, the businesses, all foreign to me, new, unexplored. "Mom, where do those roads go?" I asked, constantly. Take SW 15th street, for instance, away from our neighborhood, it became a dirt road and went into a forest next to a creek. And while my parents told me it didn't go over the river, it never kept me from dreaming exactly where it went. I don't think I ever went down the road myself, and maybe that's for the best. The unknown is so much more Romantic than what is traveled.

Detmer Highway, Yukon Territory, Canada

But there is nothing that is unknown now, not with the Internet within easy reach of our fingers at every moment. Google Maps has taken satellite images of almost every corner of our globe. I've talked about walking down a highway in the Yukon Territory in Canada, with the mountains in the foreground and the grass ranging forever to my side. I've traveled the streets of London, wondering who lived in those houses, what their lives were like. And so there's still the sense of the unknown, even when sitting at the repository of everything known. The GPS system, however, totally removes all Romantic notions of traveling down strange roads. Your path becomes a straight line, purple, with a British accented guy informing you of the way, as if God was speaking directly to you. There is no other path but Garmin, or Tom Tom. There is no getting in the car and cruising down the interstate, with the feeling of never wanting to get off of it, of traveling forever into the distance, to the ends of the Earth. Now it is point A to point B, and then, "You've Arrived!" What a feeling, to worship a piece of technology because we've gotten to our destination without using our brains. Perhaps that's what people want to do now, in all aspects of life. And now, I want to digress.

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Technology has substituted for us every simple thing we do in life, except breathing, I guess. Need to balance your checkbook or make change at the cash register? Why, we have calculators and tills that do that. It's no longer necessary to do any menial task like addition and subtraction, especially not in our heads. I remember going to a Virginia McDonald's near the Virginia state line some years ago. They had just installed monitors at the check out lines, and so the workers there had gotten into the habit of not remembering anything about our orders. So it was look at the monitor, get one sandwich, look at the monitor, get the fries, look at the monitor, get the drink. Each order took 10 minutes at least. They let technology take over for their memories. And this happens all the time. The number of people who can repeat their cell phone number, or ones for their churches or businesses, are dwindling, because they easily have them stored on their cell phones. There is no longer a need to remember phone numbers. And it's not just actual electronic devices. We have devices to take care of any thing that might be the least bit taxing. I once saw, while cleaning my mom's office, a letter folder. That's right, a machine that folds a piece of paper exactly into thirds. And then there's the shirt folder (now, honestly, I can't fold shirts to save my life, so I don't try.). There's an electronic pepper shaker, so that we don't have to actually grind and shake the pepper ourselves.

 It's not just the idea that we are getting lazy, which we are, but that we are substituting technology, even in the simplest form, to do every task that we have done in the past. And for what cost? How much resources does it take to create these things? What plastic, what oil? I'm not environmental by any means, but we have been used to purchasing any device that might make our lives easier, and sacrificing those materials to do it. How long will those things sit in our landfills when, inevitably, we throw them away for something better? Why bother typing a text when we can speak into our phones and keep from typing all together. Soon the art of typing a letter will go the way of handwriting. It will become useless. The main purpose of all this? Capitalism. Producing things that cost money in order to feed our need to save time, money, labor, all the things we usually wind up wasting anyway because of these objects. Debating whether this is a good thing or not, Capitalism, I mean, is a whole other blog.  But again, I digress...
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Back to getting lost.  I never take the same way home that I took going wherever it is that I am going.  Which makes coming home so much more fun.  My mom and I often go to Southern Gospel concerts here in the Atlanta area.  And it often is that leaving the church or the Gwinnett Arena, the roads we came in on are blocked off.  We have to make a right instead of a left.  If I had a GPS system, it would automatically adjust and take me on a path straight home.  But what most people should know is that, if you look at Atlanta like a spoked wheel, it is impossible to remain totally lost for long.  You're bound to run into an Interstate or GA 400 or something, so driving home becomes an adventure.  Turn the car in the direction of the spokes, and go.  We were at a singing in Gainesville, and, heading west, we drove over Lake Lanier, over a beautiful blue steel bridge, and drove through little towns and hole in the wall restaurants, and we hit 400 and came south.  I wasn't lost.  I was just not in a hurry to get home.  When my family went to New Orleans to see Oklahoma lose to LSU in the Sugar Bowl several years ago, going home I went the wrong way and we ended up crossing Lake Pontchartrain, on a bridge that took you away from land, so far out that you could see nothing but the lake.  It was also a bridge that was destroyed a few years later by Hurricane Katrina.  Getting lost allowed us to see the beauty of nature, the exaltation of mankind's creations, the harmony of both God and Man intertwined in this great country.  So maybe getting from point A to point B isn't enough.  Maybe hearing "You've arrived at your destination," is the worst part of the trip.  As a busting-minded animated girl once said, "The Joy is in the Journey." There is so much to see between the cradle to the grave.  Let's not take the shortest route. 

Step Into the Rain....Leave the GPS at Home.

I honestly think that if Darwin saw us today, he would be in shock about how we have reversed natural selection. Through technology. Through science. We've actually made it possible for us all to be weaker and still survive. An example: I was helping a customer at Borders a few days ago. We did not have the book they were looking for, but after checking with the Snellville store, straight north of our location, I told them that they had it. Snellville is absolutely straight north of us, with no turns off of Turner Hill Road (124) until you reach the store. 20 minutes, tops. The customer then asked me for an address so that they could program it into their GPS system. It really made no sense to me why they would need their GPS to go in a straight line. But directions for people seem to be one of the things that we've lost as technology has improved. Many years ago, when sailors guided ships through unknown seas to islands that could have easily (and were, sometimes) missed, they took accurate and dependable navigations using a sextant, the sun, moon, and stars. Or pioneers, who used landmarks, rivers, mountains, etc... to find their way to distant posts. I often do the same thing, when my memorizing of maps (you know, the paper ones, or at the very least, a good look at Google Maps) fails me. I always seem to know the direction to wherever it is I need to go. Atlanta makes it easy that way. As long as you head in any direction, you will eventually hit an interstate, which will take you home...etc... It's easy. But people are scared of the unknown. Scared of what will take them away from someone holding their hands. They should switch off their GPS systems and rely on their brains. Much like Luke Skywalker did in Star Wars. And besides, it will keep your car from being broken into and your GPS stolen.
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It's the paradox of technology that interests me, the pull toward timidity, a lack of vision, a lack of drive, even as the advances we have so creatively constructed pull us forward. We are fastly becoming slaves to the mechanical men around us. Take for instance the calculator, and subsequent inventions of doing math electronically. Now, at retail stores, it is quite impossible for cashiers to actually do the math of giving out change in their heads. In some instances, the registers even hand out the change for them. If one were to take the monitors offline and force everyone to give back change by simply adding back to the customer, I doubt that anyone could do it. The reliance on technology has become too great. I once was in a McDonalds in Virginia. It was a band trip to Washington DC, and so the great busses filled with hungry instrumentalists filed into the golden arches after having watched way too many movies on the DVD screens above the heads of each traveler (of which I wanted to take baseball bats to the screens, but that's another rant). We went in and saw that they had just installed monitors on each of the registers, so that the people getting the orders could see what each person ordered. So, instead of using their brains and memorizing the order, getting the fries, drink, and burger all at once, they got the fries....then looked at the monitor... then got the drink....then looked at the monitor...then got the burger.... well... you get the idea. Each order took at least 10 minutes to do. It was the most ill-run restaurant I'd ever been in, and I'm convinced it was due to the new monitors that
made it unnecessary for the workers to actually use their brains.

How many people could even estimate percentage off. Who could figure out the problems with a computer or Air Conditioning, figure out how to troubleshoot it? I'm sure that the service operators at Dell or HP must get the most asinine calls, since the troubleshooting manuals talk about the most simple of problems: Is your Computer not coming on at all? Solution: Have you plugged in the power cord? I loved the AC unit manual, which suggested that if the Air Conditioner wasn't running, that we might not have plugged it in, or turned it on. There is so sense anymore when it comes to dealing with technology or figuring out even the most mundane things about life in one's head. We need some sort of machine to do it for us. I don't doubt the novels of Isaac Asimov, when the world of robots would someday become as smart as us, and, instead of being the servants, would actually be the rulers. It makes the Terminator world seem not so far off, although I seriously doubt if any of us are intelligent enough to create such mechanical marvels.
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One of my associates, Jeremy, told me about a time when he went to the grocery store, and when he arrived, it was raining fairly hard. He was greeted with the sight of quite a few customers standing outside the store, groceries already bagged, waiting for the rain to end. They just didn't want to get wet. They seemed frightened, as if they were cats. Jeremy got out of the car and went into the store, resulting in quite a few incredulous stares. With all of life that's going on around them, and they don't want to get wet? We are in Oz, and the people around us are combinations of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion. Most of all, they are too dumb to step out into the rain.
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So what am I saying? Well, for one, I've seen too many people paralyzed at the thought of using a piece of technology. I know people who look at an ATM machine and just stare blankly at it, or cringe at using a digital camera. On the flip side, there are the people who are so dependent on their technology that they are enslaved to it. It's time we stopped cowering in fear from the Frankensteins we have created and start being their masters. We have made these wonders of science in order to progress further from them, like steps up some imaginary flight of stairs. We should also master the natural things in this world, and not be afraid of a little rainstorm. Should we get a little wet, well, that's what umbrellas are for, or if nothing else, we should get wet in order to see the sun shine again, or the rainbow filtering through the clouds. We must find our place in this world, in harmony with the natural things as well as the technological. God gave us all this that we might prosper and develop... let us make use of it.