The Danger of Sharing Everything, a Warning from the Past...

I have NEVER come across anything that sums up the dangers of having everything posted or reported on via the Internet, whether through social media or the constant stream of "news" than the following paragraph. Shall we heed this warning and pull in the reins or continue to create an avalanche, suffocate, and lose some of the subtle beauty of humanity? Ironically, this revelation was published in 1940 by a small town newspaper editor, Henry Beetle Hough, in his book, Country Editor. Though he is talking from the standpoint of a newspaper reporter about a small town paper, I believe we all have those inklings of discomfort when every little thing, good and bad, but especially the special things that as he points out, should go on, unchronicled in a public setting...so that they remain precious.

There is a great deal that one cannot print in any newspaper, even in a country paper. Not the big things, not the things one might be accused of suppressing for gain or through fear, but the little, unceasing, significant things. Life itself is inexpressibly precious with its naturalness, its free play of impulses, ideas, plans, dreams, and there is a line beyond which an honest reporter cannot go. For life to read these things about itself would be to spoil them, to make them feel given away and cheap. For this reason a great deal that is most precious must go on, day by day, unchronicled; but here in the country one is aware of it and is rewarded for living and for seeing.

Chapter 7: "Shadows of the Old Order"

We are all aware that "things" were "different" in the past. Some of these things we know, e.g. people used horses for transportation before there were cars. Sometimes things surprise us. In reading Country Editor by Henry Beetle Hough, I was surprised by the following passage about the independent thinking and action when it came to providing a rural area, in this case, Martha's Vineyard, with telephone service and electricity, and the nature of transportation to and from the island. The book was published in 1940 and covers the first twenty years that Hough and his wife served as editors of the Edgartown Gazette. Unless, it's a harmful or dangerous, I like becoming aware of different ways of being and living from other times and/or other places. It's humbling and serves to shake one a bit out of complacency.

There were many survivals of the old order in the community as we found it. Dr. Tarry was still practicing. He was tall and thin, penetrating and sardonic. He went about with a tall silk hat, cutaway coat and striped trousers....Some years earlier Dr. Tarry had built himself a telephone line and founded a telephone company. The science and business of communication was not far along, and the Bell company did not care about extending its poles on the country roads in more thinly populated districts. But in these places Dr. Tarry's patients lived, and he wanted to reach them. Being of an energetic and determined nature, he went ahead and was soon operating successfully....Dr. Tarry had sold out his telephone company to the Bell System before we took the Gazette...The electric light company, too, had been started by local enterprise...The principal figure was a former steamboat captain and islander of the old school. The founding of these enterprises was simply a continuation of an old tradition, and there was something about it which seemed to characterize the whole community. One was aware of a strong individualism, a spirit of initiative and of self reliance. In the old days the steamboats linking the island with the mainland had been built and operated by local companies....the captain had as much say about operating his steamboat as anyone else. If he wanted to leave his route and give a tow to some becalmed schooner, or salvage the cargo of a distressed craft, he did so, and the passengers had so much extra sail and so much added experience of life, in return for their delayed passage...In the modern age the steamboats had become the property of a single company, and control of the company had been sold to a railroad system on the mainland. This was the modern trend....Centralization was sucking it out of small paces such as our island. The moving impulse was no longer to be the ideas and initiative of an individual in town, but something coming, like an electric current over a wire, from a city in the distance.