From time to time, I find myself in my editor’s office, listening to Observer Editor Fred Woods impart the occasional story or tale from his long and storied past.
I enjoy these moments, getting to see a glimpse of Washington, D.C., from the perspective of his years of experience within the USDA.
He’s seen America and regions abroad, and always has a story from these journeys.
Earlier this week, Woods was discussing an experience he had with a particularly troublesome member of Congress, someone who seemed to continually have it out for him.
Ever attentive to detail, Woods paused for a moment to try to remember the home state of the cantankerous congressman.
“I can’t remember if he was from Louisiana or Florida,” Woods said. “One of them, I’m sure.”
He then rattled off the name of the offending member, but said he wasn’t sure of the state.
Sitting in front of Woods on his desk: a relatively new Apple computer with a fully working, relatively high-speed Internet connection.
I jumped out of my chair and typed in the password, opening up Safari and preparing the fingers on my left hand for typing as I moved the mouse with my right hand to click the Google bar.
I typed in the name of the Congressman. Wikipedia’s entry was the third link on the page.
I clicked, and there to the right of the page, next to his honorific title of Congressman, his home state - Louisiana.
“Louisiana,” I said.
Woods began scanning the page, looking at the assembled information on his former semi-nemisis.
“That’s the difference between your generation and mine,” Woods said, as he was reading. “No one my age would have thought to look it up like this. Yours does it immediately.”
Yes, Mr. Woods. Yes, we do.
My generation, with our iPhones and our mobile internet connections, have access to as much information as we want whenever we want it.
We have the whole of the world’s knowledge at our disposal every day; all we need do is ask.
We can find our answer, usually, within a matter of seconds, not even having to click on the link to the page if we don’t desire to do so.
We click, we see ... and then we almost immediately forget.
We take immediate access to information for granted, as if it will always be there for us.
Only information we truly learn, that we take the time to process, digest and discuss - this is the information we will know and remember.
Sometimes the Internet may not work, but only the Lord or a hunchbacked Igor can take your brain and its knowledge from you.
The older generations have an advantage on us in memory recollection because they didn’t have the ability to instantly look things up.
What they know they know because they took the time to work hard and dedicate that knowledge to memory.
You didn’t have the computer; you had a list of books to get from the library and, hopefully, a kind reference librarian to help you.
As members of the younger generation, we ought to take a page from their book and crack open an actual book now and then, not just drifitng from webpage to webpage.
Then, well ... maybe then, we’ll actually start to commit an item or two to the part of our memory that lasts longer than a tweet or Facebook post.
Joe Waggoner was a Congressman from Louisiana.
I learned that this week.
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