Never saw the "Fast and Furious" films. Cars have never been my thing. Driving cars fast never appealed to me. Even as a teenager, I had minimal interest in racing down the highway.
But now I suspect that life itself is moving at a faster pace... cars move faster, NBA basketball games move faster, players are bigger and stronger. The stock market moves faster, word-of-mouth travels faster, gossip and storylines come and go, news cycles race along, and presidential candidates come and go in large numbers. The newspaper moves too slowly, articles disappearing in a cloud of smoke before the morning paper even arrives. The content is irrelevant, stale by hours.
Life is eaten up quickly. The TV lines, internet, Twitter, cellphone, Facebook... have no tolerance for dawdling. What is that doing to childhood? Children progress in a gradual way. That's why we have all those grades and levels in elementary school. You need to be a second grader before you can be a sixth grader. Bodies and minds mature in a controlled, elegant way. Nature's handiwork. Maybe that is all being disrupted. Young girls and boys get too much information about adulthood. They probably cannot wait to have those adult experiences, the ones they've been experiencing vicariously on their multitude of screens.
Not sure this "hurry-up" style of living, growing, relating, breathing, learning, experiencing will work to our advantage. There was something beautiful about the innocence of the child, not yet aware of all the inner workings of society, sexuality, mating habits, hierarchy, status, style and trends. Now the kids probably access the most intimate, graphic scenes of sexuality long before they can comfortably handle this information. I assume the adult content is just a few clicks away for them too. And they know these machines better than their parents. Everyone agrees... the youngsters master every iteration of new technologies much faster than their elders. Modern society created the teenager and now the teenager may be tossed to the trash, a casualty of the speeded up life-- as kids go from 10-20 years in a single bound.
Even spring and summer arrive too quickly these days. Scientists confirm the changes... plants bloom earlier, birds change their migration dates. Like rapper Nelly says... "it's getting hot in here" ... way too hot.
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