Random Musings On Our Popular Culture

Nowadays, most people have a lot of time on their hands due to the nature of technology and how it has made our lives, on one level, much easier to handle. Because of that, many of us can afford to wonder on what people back 60 or 70 years ago would think of the things and activities that we do as a normal part of our daily lives.

After all, what grandparents or great grandparents who served in World War II could ever conceive that there would be a computer that could be priced low enough to be available to everybody, let alone made so small that they could fit literally into the palm of the hand. And something like computer skins? Who would’ve ever envisioned something like a cover that’s called a skin?

And as far as our personal fitness or health — or at least the activities we engage in to convince people we have a lot of health and fitness — goes, how many people back then would look at us with a quizzical expression on their faces as we told them about all the work we were doing to get 6 pack abs? To them, a six-pack was something that was used to carry beer around in.

As far as body art — which is the more socially acceptable term for tattoos these days — the very fact that one can design own tattoo drawings and then have an artist with them on one’s skin probably would come as a big surprise to all those Navy sailors throughout the years who got their tattoos from some tattoo parlor in San Diego or Norfolk, Virginia.

Popular culture these days is also continually available on a 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and 365 days per year basis. In fact, even if we wanted to block it out of our lives, there’s practically no way to do so, which just about any Amish or Mennonite adherent living somewhere in Ohio or Pennsylvania and riding in a horse drawn cart could tell you.

People like the Amish are forced to deal with popular culture and try to prevent it from trespassing on their own lives whenever they can. They probably look at us as being far too much in touch with the here and now and our own self-involvement then they usually are. However, most people not Amish probably wouldn’t dream of going back to the actual old days that we sometimes pine about.

For a fact, there is no way of ever being able to completely eliminate popular culture in our lives. But our grandparents probably pondered on that same question when they first saw Elvis Presley doing his grinding and wiggling on television. However, we look at that and wonder what all the concern was about. It’s fairly certain that people have century from now will wonder the same thing about us.