Lynn gave a talk about living in Greenbelt as a child. That community was the first one planned with automobiles in mind. Since cars can be move faster than humans and weigh much more, we have to watch out for them. The age of automobiles has been on us for more than one hundred years now. There is a big difference between being able to drive yourself and large quantities of your clothing, books, and smart devices several hundred miles at any time, and being limited to walking and some times, horse power. A little math says that walking allows a person to cover anywhere in 19 square miles but a car allows a person to cover 10,000 times that area.
The automobile is a big part of American and other lives and has been for a while but other important features have arisen, too. Radio and television matter. Older features such as the railroad and the telegraph seemed like magic at first - see "What Hath God Wrought" by Howe. Getting from discovery of electricity to having it as a utility for many purposes just waiting in the wall took centuries.
The internet, in its current form, is roughly thirty years old. The idea of using signals to converse, vote, shop, learn, create and store documents, work, and play games is a fairly new one and is still completely unknown in some places. Birth control along with prompting girls to become highly educated and employed adults is having an effect on the birth rate, which, in turn, affects nearly every aspect of a nation.
The Buddha, 2500 years ago, emphasized that everything changes. So, life as we know it is not what our grandparents or their grandparents or even, Lynn points out, what we knew. We try to live well: happily, usefully, morally. It is not always easy and sometimes it is not even possible at all. But given our brains, our muscles and our cooperation with each other, we may manage.
