Today I’m feeling the need to rewrite an old adage:
The more things stay the same, the more they change. I grew up in small-town Oklahoma, and I lived on the rural side of that. The woods, for me, served as playground, sanctuary and laboratory. My brother and I spent far more time riding bikes on horse trails than we did sitting in movie theaters or in front of TVs, that’s for sure. The Illinois river ran through my backyard, and my dad and brother and I would frequently round up old tractor tire inner tubes and make our languid way down a stretch of it. White water rafting, this was not! It can take hours just to go a few miles when the river is feeling particularly lazy.
So it was with great anticipation that I planned to take my lovely wife and daughter back to my old haunts for part of our summer vacation this year.
Now, I’d heard that tourism on the river had increased quite a lot over the past few decades, so we made our rental reservations in January, in the middle of a cold snap in Colorado. It felt a little odd talking to the lady about fun in the sun, but I wanted to make sure we didn’t get crowded out when the day finally came.
It did finally come. And my river did look exactly the same as it did so long ago. I was so ready for some serious relaxing, some family water fights and a whole lot of sunshine. There were indeed more people on the river than I remembered. A whole lot more, in fact. But that was OK, I figured. It would be like a jostling picnic at the lake, I figured. It would just add to the festive mood, I figured.
I figured wrong.
My old backyard had apparently turned into a party spot for twentysomethings. Actual families were few and far between as our inner tubes got trapped between raft after raft of booze-drenched revelers, each more eager than the last to assail everyone within earshot (us!) with f-word-laden dirty jokes and jibes tossed back and forth between the rafts.
I’m not kidding or exaggerating even a little bit, here. Over the course of the 3-hour tour we spent on that river that afternoon, we heard more hard-core profanity than most R-rated movies have.
Now, maybe it was just a jinx from deciding to do this on the 4th of July weekend. But shouldn’t that have just meant more families would be out on excursions, like us? Did I miss the Midwest memo that said, “Bud-crazed and bikini-obsessed partiers only!”?
Oklahoma law only allows low-alcohol-content beer on the river … but that seemed to mean everybody just drank more of it.
Is this what happens, I couldn’t help but wonder, when a culture soaks up so much crude and crass entertainment, that nothing’s off-limits any longer? Can we blame movies and music for men no longer caring that women and children are nearby when they turn the air blue? Can we blame Vogue and YouTube for women no longer caring how much of what parts of their bodies they’re showing off to the world? Can we blame Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central for priming everyone for crass punch lines?
It’s actually pretty easy, if I dare use that word, to make decisions about what kind of content we ingest by way of entertainment. But it’s a whole different game when that content rolls over the top of you in a real-world environment. How many guys in how many rafts was I supposed to yell at to watch their mouths, anyway?
On a much more pleasant note, back home here in Colorado, we officially wrapped up our vacation with a sojourn to the rodeo. That, too, was something I grew up with, but my wife and daughter didn’t and haven’t. So it was new for them. I’ll admit I was a bit nervous that the emcee patter (so much a part of these events) would drive us away faster than a cowboy can rope a calf. But the opposite proved true.
So some things can stay the same, it seems.
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