Big Sky

The sky looks bigger here.

Its hard to say why, its hard to pinpoint whether its a change in perception or a change in landscape or a change in my geometric position on the Earth. All I know is that every time I look up I am staring at something far grander than I used to see back home.

Then again, I’ve got some time to see what the sky has to offer. During Pre-Service Training, there was hardly time to breathe. Another lesson was to be planned or another noun tense to be studied. And I’m certainly busy here at site, playing with kids and meeting community members, writing grants and picking up trash. But some days, like today, a SUnday in late August where rain drizzles the day away, I find myself with some time. Usually all I have to do is poke my head outside onto the street and I’ll be bombarded by children, just looking for something to do. “Budesh Hulyatee, Dzeremi?” Won’t you come out an play? But today the calls are nought, today there is rain.

I think back to my own childhood, rainy days in Paramus, New Jersey and sunny summers at Camp Tel Noar and everything I had that they don’t. Every time I;m too tired to play, I remember that these kids can’t pop inside and look for a good movie on cable or surf the web for some cool new game. And for many of them, their parents can;t be there to occupy their time, because their parents are at work or working in the fields, or drunk, or 200 miles away, or 6 feet under ground.

When I was younger, my parents had a rule on school nights. One hour of television, no more. Want to be entertained? Read a book.

And read I did, devouring novels and biographies and mysteries and Anecdotal legends of American Folk Lore. But at some point the rules melted away, and Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill and the Boxcar Children were replaced by Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin and the children of South Park. Suddenly, if I wasn’t watching the tube I was sitting on AOL, waiting for the girl I like to sign online so I could see if her away message reflected that inside joke we had made together in science class.

The Internet made my emotional teenage years at least a bit more full of angst. And I can only begin to imagine the compounding of this angst in an age of status updates and tweets and BBMs and a small black box in your pocket that irrevocably intertwines you and the world.
Its pretty easy to see the benefits of our newfound connectedness. The breadth of human knowledge is at our fingertips. We can find friends long since forgotten in an instant. We are never alone. And any time we need direction we can just flip on our GPS and that robotic female voice can tell us where to go.

I am of the last generation of Americans who will remember life without the internet. When I walk around my Ukrainian village, a place yet to be saturated with PDAs and IPhones, I try to imagine the pluses and minuses High Speed Internet will bring. We will expose the children to a world that they never knew existed. Yet at the same time, we will expose the children to a world we never knew existed.

A few years ago, a few of my friends started their own independent music label called Underwater Peoples. These entrepreneurs devoted much of their company’s time to producing actual Records, 7” and 11”, and CDs, mix tapes from High School days past. In an increasingly digital age, their endeavor was an ode to the tangible, and ode to the real.

On of the artists who has contributed to their label is a folksy guitarist and part time poet who goes by the stage name Liam the Younger. The first song on his album After the Graveyard has one of the most beautiful and prescient words about the internet I have ever heard:

“And some day the internet will be our version of the Wild West
And we will be remembered as we now remember them
Some will be folk heroes, and others will be villains
As we sing the songs, oh the song about them.”

We are entering unchartered territory, a great global frontier journey that lacks a GPS to guide us, no crystal ball or algorithm to tell us where we’re heading. And we’re heading there mighty fast, and I’m relishing the chance to slow down, just a bit, just for a while.

I’ve had this theory for a while now, this notion that my generation, that first generation who came of age along with the internet, can be classified as Generation Delta, constantly changing over time. Things are moving so fast that no matter how many times that robotic voice tells us to turn left 500 feet ahead, we don’t hear her. For as fast as we are going someone is inevitably going fast, and suddenly we here of some doomed Donner pass and we take it, all the while knowing we may be digging a shortcut doubling as a grave.

I recently read an article in the New York Times, about a group of prestigious psychologists who conducted an experiment with themselves as the test subjects. Leaving their cell phones and email behind, they went on a five day rafting trip, as a test to see whether people’s attention, and general brain function, has been altered by our addiction to technology. All the scientists, skeptics and believers alike, felt something change by the end of those five days. As one scientist put it, “you hear things you didn’t hear before.”

I hear things here I didn’t hear before. I go outside and I see a sky that stretches on forever, stars that give the darkness a glimmer of hope. Every day feels truly beautiful, and I just can’t tell if its that life is slower or that I’m not checking my email every five minutes or if the lack of pollution and skyscrapers has just upped this place’s rank of the visually appealing scale. Or perhaps its just a delusion, my own desire to try and be happy here fooling me into thinking that things are grander, all around.

My mother told me to take a kindle. “What will you do when you run out of books?” My father keeps pushing me to get internet access. “How can we talk to you? How can we see you?” My friends still think I’m crazy and maybe I am. And I could still get a kindle and I could still work on getting internet but I’m happy the way things are, and I think a part of me is afraid that if I get to connected, I’ll again be trapped by the yoke that forced me to flee halfway around the world in order to escape.

So when the Director of my school, who is slowly becoming my Ukrainian Folk Hero, talks of his dream of bringing high speed internet to the village, I am torn. I see his dream, I empathize with his vision. And yet I have come to truly appreciate this way of life, to value what it is they hold dear. I love that kids play together in the middle of the street and that neighbors don’t need to call before popping by and that everybody is in it together because, frankly, the same cold winter is coming for us all and the same gigantic sky looms above us.

Something about the internet changes all that. It makes the world go a lot faster and it makes the world a hell of a lot bigger and suddenly, when you can play chat roulette with people all over the world, when you can watch live views of the New York street half a world away and when you can let all your friends across the globe know what you are thinking and feeling at a given moment, the sky above just doesn’t seem so big.