I once was asked by a young man who was an official member of a high school honor society, a youngster I now believe is at a very fine university, the following question: "How did you change the channels on the television set if, as you say, you did not have a remote control?"
I explained, managing to avoid remarks that despaired of the hopelessness in the younger generation, that we used to just get up, walk over to the television set, and keep turning the dial until we got what we wanted. He looked at me quizzically, as if it would be appropriate for an archaeologist to box me up and ship me on downtown to stand next to a dinosaur skeleton.
But then he had a pretty good comeback. "Can you show me how you did that, on this television?" he asked, pointing to the sleek, flat-screen box in his parents' living room. I walked over and looked the machine up and down and realized that there was no obvious place to change the channels manually. Technology for him had not only made things easier, it had erased history.
If we may be a bit Jurassic for a moment, let us wander back to the Time Before Cellphones (TBC), when we actually survived a day, and then another, and then another, without having a wireless phone riding on the hip. When we would go hours ... hours! ... without talking on the phone at all. We would go deep in the woods. We would take long automobile trips. We would go to malls and disperse, agreeing to meet at a pre-arranged location a couple of hours later without any further contact. We went to movies that played without interruption from glowing lights and buzzes. Ministers pronounced from the pulpit without fear that an altar call would be interrupted by ringtones.
Car phones? Are you kidding? We saw them as space-age gizmos confined to science-fiction shows we watched on that television without the remote control.
This brings us to today, to 2010 ADC (After the Destruction of Civilization), and the latest word from our colleague Bruce Siceloff, The N&O's Road Worrier, who reported Monday that a News & Observer/ABC11 Eyewitness News poll came in with interesting results. Some 47 percent of respondents said they would support banning all cell phone use while driving. Forty percent said they'd ban hand-held cell phone use but it would be OK to let people use the hands-free devices.
This is astonishing. How many of us know people (the answer is, by the way, all of us) who treat their cell phones as if they were connected to oxygen? Or people who cut on their cell phones in the morning when they get in their cars to go to work with the same instinct they have for turning the key in the ignition?
And yet, as if it has come From Above, here is a poll that would seem to indicate that people are starting to see the hazards in driving and talking away with your hand pressing a phone to your ear. Those hazards are obvious, of course, as anyone who's been in a sedan at an intersection and watched as a big SUV made a sweeping turn towards them while the driver was one-handing the wheel and one-handing the phone.
If you're a proud multitasker who believes in his or her ability to do justice to several things at once, my apologies. And you're welcome to continue to do so. But I'm with the 47 percent. Don't do it while you're sitting on top of a couple of tons of motorized steel.
And as far as those who believe regulating cell phone use is somehow an infringement on privacy rights, I'd argue that changes when you get behind the wheel. We don't let folks swish around their gin and tonics with one hand while another's on the wheel, or allow them to draw a bead on a passing deer while tooling down Cary Parkway.
Cell phones are, as statistics and some tragic anecdotal evidence show, a traffic hazard, and it's long-since time the problem was addressed. Somehow, we all survived for centuries without the technology to talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime. America, TBC, wasn't really so primitive.
