Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
“Operator”
I heard a great song in my car yesterday – “Operator,” a 1972 folk/love song by Jim Croce. It’s a simple, beautiful song about a man’s effort to recover from a breakup with his girlfriend. What makes it so wonderful is that everyone can identify with the message. Everyone. Right? But then I started to wonder what someone would think of that song if they were under, say, 40 years old.
First of all, they would wonder, what the heck is a pay phone? Why would you need a dime to make a phone call? What is an operator? And why would you need the assistance of that person (or anyone else) to make a phone call? Ever heard of speed dial? Heck, just tell your phone to make the call and it does it on its own, right? And then, he can’t read the number on the matchbook because it’s old and faded. OK, so what is a matchbook, why would you be carrying one around, and why would you use that as a filing system for contacts? Many young people have forgotten the time when basically everybody smoked. Restaurants had complimentary matchbooks and ashtrays at the tables. And before cell phones, a matchbook might be the most convenient way to jot down a quick note, like a phone number. Lots of important information was written in matchbooks in those days. But there is something else in that song that I think many young people today would have difficulty identifying with:
The sense of longing. The pain of separation. Today, the guy in the song would be on his ex-girlfriend’s Snapchat and Instagram and he would rarely go more than a few hours without a running commentary of her current activities, in real time, complete with photographs. They would be texting, and maybe even FaceTiming and so on. It’s hard to miss someone when they don’t really leave.
I have three teenage daughters. They get nervous if their boyfriend doesn’t return a text within a certain amount of time. I’ll say, “Relax – he’s probably busy.” She’ll respond, “He posted on his Instagram 18 minutes ago. He’s on his phone, but he’s not responding to me. Something’s wrong.”
I can’t imagine dating in this environment. If one of us was busy, I would go days or weeks without seeing my girlfriend. And that was probably good. It gave us both a break. And a chance to think about things. No male can think with a pretty girl nearby.
Now, the availability and expectations of perpetual contact have had a profound impact on courting. I think it adds a lot of pressure, especially for the boyfriends. Lord help them.
Missing out on that sense of longing, to me, is really too bad. I think that how you handle being apart is a good indicator of how you’re likely to do together. But I sometimes think that it’s more than the sense of longing that today’s youth don’t fully understand.
I’m not convinced that they really understand love. Actual, true love. I suspect that some young people now would hear “Operator” and think to themselves, “What the heck? Has that dude never heard of Tinder?”
As the left has spent the last several decades successfully attacking traditional family structure and the role of men and women in that structure, they have also been promoting free love. Once the pill came out, and we dispensed with most of the restrictive religious and ethical limitations on sex, then relationships became more about sex than they are about the search for a lifetime soulmate.
In my view, the women’s liberation movement was really the men’s liberation movement. No more rules. If it feels good at the time, do it. Why not? If a woman won’t have sex with you, she’s not being sensible or selective, she’s just being a prude. Go find someone who will make you feel good. Because that’s what it’s all about. So girls start competing with one another not with beauty or personality, but simply with willingness to perform sexual favors for nearly anyone. This race to the bottom diminishes everyone involved.
Our obsession with sexual pleasure has led to neglect of other, more important things. Like love. Devotion. Longing. Sacrifice. All the things that make life truly beautiful.
All the things that make life truly beautiful.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when you watch movies, love stories rarely involve pornography, and pornography rarely involves love. We can see that in the dating scene now. Love can be difficult and painful, so it’s better to just stick with casual sex. That, at least, is fun. Less potential for emotional complications. And if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t really lost anything.
Of course, that also means that you really didn’t have anything to begin with. But, whatever.
So how does this end? We don’t know. It may be generations before we see the end result of our loss of interest in love. But I find it terrifying. One reason that human societies tend to be so violent is that, in my view, hate is a stronger emotion than love. This is especially true if we diminish the role of love in our lives. One might expect such a society to become more hateful, bitterly divided, and violent. So our disinterest in love is scary.
And sad. I miss beauty. The beauty of real, true love. Love – real, true love – is beautiful. It’s meaningful and real.
I only wish my words could just convince myself that it just wasn’t real.
But that’s not the way it feels.
Published in General
It’s a clever name until bars refuse to book you because they don’t want to advertise “free beer.”
My favorite example of not caring in the least about political correctness – I was working with a client in Delaware when I heard an ad on the radio for a music festival starring a punk band called “Special Ed and The Short Bus”.
I imagine “Wichita Lineman” sounds pretty cryptic to younger listeners— for its evocations of isolation and romantic longing, as much as for the whole telephone wire premise.
(Some background on the song and on Jimmy Webb, here) –
https://www.steynonline.com/8025/wichita-lineman
I have to agree with your precocious daughter.
I would also point out that the protagonists in “Operator” and “Sylvia’s Mother” were probably co-dependent and, if it were real life, would get over the girls eventually.
I remember such attachments now with a kind of horror. It’s not a horror that I might have ended up miserable (a distinct possibility) but a realization that I would have made those girls miserable. For, in my case, the sense of unrequited longing was due to a lack of self-love – a feeling that I was incomplete and relatively worthless without the other to make me whole. What a recipe for misery.
Not all marriages are healthy and not all should survive.
What are we doing here in the comments if not writing letters to each other?
An old and distant friend of mine revealed that she had kept my letters from college (even though nearly 40 years had passed and her entire marriage and child-rearing took place in the interim). What possible value could they still be?
They are a physical manifestation of a previous life, the memories of which have been pushed to the margins by the consuming necessities of the current life. When (if) she reads them, she will get to remember what was important to her, what was important to you, what was important in the 1980s (?). She will get to reassess who she is now based on who she thought she was – and who she wanted to be – then.
The reading of these would likely reveal more to her about the human condition than any twelve Bildungsromans could possibly manage.
Plus there might be jokes.
I believe there are divorces made in heaven.
You don’t know why someone kept all your letters? And you can’t imagine what value they would be to anyone?
No, we’re not writing letters to each other. We are exactly not. We are cannot show our handwriting whether it trembles slightly or not, if it’s loose and flowery one paragraph and rigid and upright the next. We cannot hold the paper that the sender held. And we do not see the chosen stamp nor smell the scent the sender would have chosen. We can’t put it in a drawer and keep it. We can only access it through the benevolent offices of others’ servers. Or else we have to print out our own copy without our own paper and own ink, in a font of our own, and save something that has never been touched by the other.
And as I believe the author indicated, we have lost the chance to wait and watch and wonder and wish, and hope for the next letter which we receive. I have letters and cards from my grandmother that I cherish.
So yes, I must say we really do lose something.
A friend once told me almost the exact same thing. He said that walking alone one day he realized that God did not want him to live this way. I never met the woman he divorced, but I get the impression his next wife was exactly the same.
Wherever you go, there you are.
I just realized, late to this post and ‘liking’ it, that you now have 72 likes. That’s a lot of likes…..this post was beautifully written from the heart – your eyes are open to your children – I hope they read this, and if not they should read it. I (funny) thought this was a story on Jim Croce and his music. That song takes me back to high school, here I felt every emotion your daughters feel.
I’ll tell you this – I thought my generation who was a part of the women’s movement and broke some barriers – and come to find out that women are right back in the same mode that your daughters are – waiting for the phone to ring – or the text……Please tell your girls that the men will come and go, but the one that cherishes you, and respects you, and makes you laugh and that you can trust without having to check your phone, is worth your time – the rest just throw in a bucket as “a friend with benefits” (I hate that term – I don’t even know the texting jargon but that one is icky)…..focus on learning, finding something you love to do, and cherish your friends and family.
Did anyone paste in the song?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5NwG6klB60
Beautiful!
How about The Carpenters – and Merry Christmas!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR1ujXx2p-I
Indeed. Even if, against staggering odds, Ricochet is still around in 40 years, the chances these “letters” will still be part of it are vanishingly small. And even if they were, how would you find them?
When Dennis Miller had his radio show, there was a web site too for show news, discussion, etc. After the radio show ended, some people believed the web site would continue as their “community.” But I didn’t. Who would pay for hosting a site that no longer served any commercial purpose? And within just a few months, it was gone.
Another possibility that should not be overlooked is that, even if Ricochet does last for decades, it could morph completely away from what it is now. Especially since the current billing is “civil conversation.” The left has decided that only Leftist conversation is “civil” conversation. Anything else offends them, and hence is un-civil. So it really wouldn’t surprise me if at some point, Ricochet pulls a Breitbart and becomes a horrible morass.
I left a few posts at the DMZ, myself.
My point about the letters is not that this medium is the same as handwritten letters -rather, that we actually communicate much more and to more people than we ever did writing handwritten letters. We’re actually more literate and have a nominally higher number of correspondents. That’s better.
I have a better chance of writing something that will stick in someone’s head here at Ricochet or even the late, lamented DMZ, than I did writing a few dozen letters to girlfriends in college.
You know my brother?
Wait, so you mean it’s not a song about a guy who plays defensive line for Wichita State?
I thought something like that when I was a kid when it first came out. I was more into football than electricity.
(Laughing out loud) Yeah, I guess he’s the one.
Actually that’s a fairly common pathology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O1rHYWH8MY
Man: “Once I married someone who was beautiful and young and gay and free. What ever happened to her?”
Woman: “You divorced her and married me!”