“The old saw reminds us that, to a man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Does it follow that to a girl with a Photobucket account, the whole world looks like a fashion shoot? Or that to a boy with a joystick and a graphics card, the whole world looks like a psychotic dwarf with an axe? To an important extent—definitely more than we have been comfortable admitting—yes, it sort of does. Ultimately, the answer is not to take away the hammer, but to see that it is used for more than bashing away at things. To ensure our children free their hands—and their heads—to take up other tools too.” --Excerpt from The Winter of Our Disconnect
So I fulfilled two dreams at once on Sunday: Ascending a pulpit - a REAL one this time, not the one that's always there in my head - and standing on the hallowed ground once trod by my heroes Thoreau, Emerson and Dickinson. I gave the opening lecture at this year's Monadnock Lyceum in Peterborough, New Hampshire (a town so adorable you keep trying to hug it). The series is held at the Universalist Unitarian Church on Main St., and the pulpit in question was evidently host to both Thoreau and Emerson in its day. Presumably not simultaneously. They were close, but let's not get carried away.
THE pulpit. That's not me, but I think you get the picture.
ps If you want a copy of my talk, email me on the contact page. I was having such a good time up there extemporizing I only got around to giving half of it!
pps The event was recorded by NPR for New Hampshire Public Radio for broadcast next Sunday. Sooner or later, you'll be able to find it here.
Earlier in the weekend, I had stopped at Walden Pond to pay my respects and found the experience transcendently moving (despite the un-ironic sale of t-shirts reading "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes"), and after my lecture I hied myself to another personal shrine: the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Mass. #seeNewEnglandly
The original
The re-mix
When Long Island native Susan Maushart was living in Australia with her three children, she pulled the plug on the family's electronics. For six months in 2009, she and her son and daughters, then ages 14, 15 and 18, gave up devices from iPods to cell phones to video games in their home. Maushart wrote about the results of what the family came to call "The Experiment" in the new book "The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept With Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale" (Tarcher/Penguin paperback, $16.95).
"Technology isn't evil," Maushart says - in fact, now that she has moved to Mattituck with her youngest daughter, Sussy, 16, she relishes using Skype and Facebook to keep in close touch with her two older kids still in Australia.