A Fifty Year Loss of Literacy

Watching movies in reaction to the Iran US conflict made me think about how much more ignorant and uninformed the general population has become. over the years. I can speak from a sociodemographic I am describing. My parents were ordinary average people. My father in his twenties, when I was born, was a laborer in construction, an ironworker. My mother was a homemaker. Neither of my parents had graduated from high school. Nonetheless, I remember my father and mother reading the newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer EVERY Day! They looked forward to it, enjoyed it. And my mother subscribed to 4 or 5 magazines: The Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life, Home and Garden, Women's DAy. National Geographic. Those magazines were entertaining AND instructive. They brought the whole wide world into your home. And for me they were the beginning of my passion for both ART and Writing. The Saturday Evening Post covers told a story and a poem. They were so emotionally evocative and beautiful. To me they were the peak and the essence of artistic expression - to communicate to others so completely an ephemeral yet profound and timeless feeling, to be able to do that was like magic, the magic of communication.

The comedian Kathleen Madigan in one of her routines relates how a 'valley girl millennial' in a store in California looked at the state on her identification card, which is Missouri, or MO in abbreviation and just said "NO" like it was a forged identification with a made-up state name. I know it is only a joke but it is shocking to me how ignorant so many people have become.

All of my latest essay writing was instigated by the Iran conflict, as I was saying, and my early introduction to this historic conflict came from movies: EXODUS, which I read in novel form first by Leon Uris, before the film starring Paul Newman. Both are magnificent and very nuanced introductions to the beginning of the Israeli Country as a modern entity. The general population of my youth was so literate that the novel, Exodus was a vast best seller! It was a big fat book of many pages and it was a mass success. It was the era of the epic.

Another epic of that era and subject area was Lawrence of Arabia which I didn't read, but which I saw in the movie theater on my high school class trip to Washington D.C. in 1963 when I was 17. Yes, we went to Washington D.C., not the Carribbean. And we saw one of the first brand new "Cinemascope" wide screen color movies. I remember sitting in the theater and the huge curtains opened on the monumental screen, about three times the size of our home town movie screen, and BOOM the color and the sound! We saw Lawrence of Arabia in magnificent color with a soul stirring sound track. And I was introduced to the rise of the colonized countries against their imperialist exploiters - and another view of the Middle East Conflict.

Dr. Zivago introduced me to the Russian Revolution and the music from that was also IMMENSE and soul stirring, unforgettable. And it inspired m to read the great writers of Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Pasternak and Turgenev.

Speaking of the music, how many of us saw FANTASIA? Our first introduction to classical music and what a huge success that was in every way. Going back to the 50's and 60's, I can't say if the other houses on our street of red brick row homes had magazines, but I know they had newspapers and people read them. Ordinary working class people don't reads newspapers anymore. They don't read the news the sports, the household tips, the want ads, the comics. They watch tv Fox News, r on their phones - facebook, Tik Tok, and YouTube. They don't read anything.

Most of the people with whom I socialize, excepting my neighbors and Quaker friends, are retired teachers and I know they read and belong to book clubs. In the book clubs they read a lot of cozy mysteries like the Three Pines series, which I love too, so I am not putting them down. But there was a time when thick tomes like HAWAII by James Michener graced the AVERAGE home book shelf! People read best sellers that were thick and informative - these books were BEST SELLERS! And people HAD book shelves!

One of my first jobs after college was as a Library Outreach Storyteller. I took library services and arts and crafts to the homes of children who lived in an economically distressed post industrial river front town. They had no books or bookshelves, but they had collections of beer cans and beer brand themed beer hats nailed around the walls for decoration. I can't honestly say where this sociodemographic fit in regard to the one I grew up in, but somehow, much lower, much more alcoholism although that affliction was epidemic in my childhood neighborhood too.

I am aware that I am now one of those old people reminiscing about the 'good old days' but nonetheless the loss of literacy is something real and something dangerous because it has given rise to MAGA.

My nephew, influenced by the other young men with whom he works as a Union electrician, argued with me about Israel and Palestine because he thought Israeli Jews came from somewhere and invaded another country and drove the people out. He had NO idea that Jews actually came from Judea in the valley of Canaan, the Holy Land. He had no geographic or historic knowledge of that area at all, only what the other guys told him. He never saw EXODUS. He had never been to Sunday School and had never heard a Bible story. I am sure neither he nor his fellow electricians knew Jesus ws a Jew, or for that matter where Jerusalem is.

Equally, young people today in the lower and working class levels of society and perhaps even the high ones, (it has been a long time since I worked at the university level and I no longer have any idea what those young people know,) but these young people don't know who "Nazi's" were. They are ignorant of World War II era history. They are raised on power figures - superheroes, mixed martial arts, and they have a distorted image of what strength looks like. They think it is swaggering. boasting and physical superiority - they are the soccer hooligans. They see Markwayne Mullins as a tough guy; he wanted to fist fight on the senate floor! One thing we have lost is the hero as a quiet man with dignity and self control, a thinking man, educated and enlightened, a man like Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden, and the best example of all, Barack Obama.

But back to literacy, I am sorry there are no more magazines in homes or even doctor's offices or waiting areas. The tools of mass literacy are disappearing and so is basic general knowledge. Schools alone can't do it all - culture, common ordinary cultural experience has to do its part. Although I devoted my life to education, it's too late for me to do anything other than what I already do which is to donate all my thousands of books to the FREE BOOKS PROJECT They put Book Arks and Free Little Libraries in all the economically deprived neighborhoods and other places and fill them with books free for the taking. I arranged one for our Woodbury Friends Meeting House grounds i Woodbury so there is one close at hand for our books to be put into. I just wonder how many people can still read. Anyhow, I remember the little child that I was borrowing books from the bookcase in my grandmother's basement and devouring them and becoming a member of the BIG World with its LONG and fascinating HISTORY.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com