1683

Two figures sit late at night in the dim candlelight of a small hut mending the tools they use during the day.

“Hey… be sure to tie that proper.”

“I can never remember.”

“How many times do I have to tell you the story?”

“Which one?”

“About the rabbit and the wolf. If you remember that story you know how to repair all these tools. Understand?”

“Yes… Grandpa? What was it like when you were my age?”

“What? Don’t be silly. Everything was exactly the same for me as it is for you. Same fields, same hut, same road to town, same river to fish in. Just as it should be. Now pay attention to what you’re doing. You can ruin a whole day’s work with shoddy repairs.”

“It’s just so hard to remember it all.”

“Trust in the knowledge passed down through the generations.”

2023

“Dad! That’s not how you do it.”

“What? This is how you showed me last time.”

“True… but they made upgrades,.. it is different now.”

“I don’t get it… why change so fast?”

“It is called progress, Dad.”

“It is not progress, it is vanity. Everything used to work just fine. It simply required labor, discipline, and integrity. That is what is being bled from the system. No one wants to do the work in raising children right anymore, so we have to have all this technology to hide the truth: that there is no integrity in anything anymore.”

“You are probably right Dad, but so what?… It’s how things are these days.”

“When I was a kid we were taught to be self-reliant and to accept that life wasn’t perfect, but with integrity and character we could plug our way through all the misery and make something of ourselves. Now, I got all these doctors who want me to be patient and sit idly by, suffering one of their miseries after another, while they experiment at making my old body perfect. Old bodies were never meant to be perfect. Not an old body that enjoyed life anyway… It is not how it is supposed to work. Our civilization has lost the thread.”

“Dad. Science and technology do make things different, but they are trying to make things better.”

“Better? Better how? By taking something straightforward and making it too complicated for anyone to understand? That is not better. What is the value of a tool no one knows how to use? Besides, it is not for us to decide what is better.. That’s nature’s job. Trouble is that there is not one shred of evidence that any of this science and technology is sustainable. It is all just a flash in the pan. I think it is the result of kids trying to show up their parents.”

“Somewhat biased view, I think.”

“Instead of just having the courage and integrity to tell their parents to bugger off, they have to invent all this useless crap to say, ‘Ha, ha, now you have to do it my way.’”

“That is not the point, Dad.”

“There was a time when you would have come to me for advice on how to do things. There is nothing wrong with change, it is just going too fast.”

“Oh, and how fast should it go?”

“Well, only nature could know that,.. but I suspect that the proper speed for change would be marked by the ability of old folklore to adapt and keep up. You know, back when knowledge and wisdom were passed down from generation to generation through stories. Those stories had always adapted to modern times,.. until our modern times destroyed them. Now, no one can keep up.”