Marking Time

January 18, 2014
By Mickey Friedman

I was relieved to read in the New York Post that “George Clooney and Rande Gerber are throwing their annual Casamigos party Sunday in Cabo.” And that “Cindy Crawford, and other stars vacationing in Cabo, such as Jessica Alba and Ewan McGregor” would be able to make it.

Were you as worried as I was that George wouldn’t mark the end of the year without a party?

Because it’s important to party. And important to step back, take a big breath, and celebrate the passing of time.

Lately I’ve come to believe that time moves faster than it used to.

Now please, you physicists, physics majors, the very many of you who are smarter than me, please don’t tell me I don’t understand time. I know I don’t understand time. Or light. Or gravity. Not to mention infinity, quarks, and black holes.

But I’m talking about my time. Time as I experience it.

I grew up with a grandmother who came to America from Hungary on a boat. She died before I had to explain Google.

She told me about how weird it was to live in a world where people now flew.

Freaked out, Nanny tried to tie time down. The one room she was given by my aunt and uncle was a never-changing museum, a small suffocating greenhouse, geraniums everywhere.

She was scared of change, and the many changes time was bringing. Like milk in cartons. Every day Nanny would boil a chicken. Chicken soup for lunch and boiled chicken for dinner. Nanny never left her apartment except for Flemington NJ for a few weeks in the summer. She somehow convinced my father that it was important that she see me at least once each summer. That our shared love for The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask was a mark of our deep bond. Which gave her permission to pinch my cheek. I put up with it partially because it was comforting to believe I had a connection with someone in that crazy apartment, but mostly because she made the most extraordinary homemade Hungarian donuts.

Nanny made it to ninety-four and did a pretty good job holding back time. A lot better than I’m doing. Because time is moving way too fast these days.

Those of us who can’t afford Cabo need Time Magazine’s People of the Year to mark year’s end. I know The Pope won but I would have voted for Edward Snowden. The Pope won for doing what Popes should have been doing all along: reminding us what Jesus would have done.

But Snowden did what a million other NSA computer wizards wouldn’t do. He told the truth about what our NSA was doing to us and our grandmothers. Going through mail, logging who we called, when and where, spying on friends and foes, trolling Twitter, and hacking networks and computers far and wide.

It took a single brave young man to tell us what he and his colleagues have known for a while: privacy is dead. If you believe what you say to your wife, your brother, your boyfriend, your broker, your kids, or your mistress is nobody’s business but your own, you’re a fool.

Because of 9/11. 9/11. 9/11.

And Big Brother.

Surely there are a host of violent, vicious enemies, but must we surrender everything we say to the men of the national security? For them to vet. Their massive mainframes shifting through every turn of phrase, flagging every pathetic typo. The trembling finger that offers terror instead of terrier. What a weird time to be checking everything when the gizmo makers make us write with every tinier keyboards. Can anyone over forty even tell what he’s pecking on his iPhone?

It’s time to acknowledge some sad realities of this past year.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all. All this massive American computer power sucking up every bit of digital flotsam from Islip to Islamabad. When President Obama can’t make a website work for millions of Americans looking for the better – what a joke – healthcare he promised. While the insurance companies use the mishap to extract even more money from those whose policies have lapsed.

So sad that Obama can’t make healthcare work any better than his high-tech drones. Yes, sparing the lives of American pilots, but bringing death to those who occupy the unluckiest of GPS coordinates. Seemingly one doomed wedding party after another in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan. Precisely, the weddings the Republican God intended us to celebrate, one man and one woman. Our talented young ones, sitting underground before their computer screens, delivering not deliverance but destruction.

Lastly, our crisis of climate. Less ice, more methane. More dead dodos than we can count. More disturbing than the screams of the scientists we just won’t hear. The catastrophe that comes towards us faster than our deadly drones. Happy New Year.

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More about the climate crisis:
http://www.thenation.com/article/177614/coming-instant-planetary-emergency