By Mark Mosgrove

    If I had to choose the most important event to happen in my lifetime, I would pick the falling of the Berlin Wall and Communism in Europe. Being raised in the 70’s and 80’s, the news media, entertainment industry and political leaders portrayed the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire and Communism as the greatest threat to freedom in the history of the world. And with the threat of nuclear war causing me to question whether or not I would ever see adulthood, it was no small accomplishment to see the entrenched Evil Empire crumble in such a short time.
    I believe World War II defined the political, economic and social climate of the century, but the fall of Communism will have global implications for the next century.
    With my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, I would choose Michael Jordan as the most influential person in my lifetime. Not for his accomplishments, but because he represents how whacked out our society has become in determining who is worthy of public praise. When more kids know who Michael Jordan is than who the President of the United States is, we’ve got some serious problems.
    Which leads me to my commentary of how society has evolved during my lifetime. I believe the evolution of mass communication is the greatest event to occur in the history of the world. The creation of the Internet is but the latest in a series of communication breakthroughs.
      Mass communication, by design, creates communication from one source to the masses. But isn’t it ironic that as our lives become more and more a rat race of pagers, cell phones, faxes, radio, television, Internet etc., our interpersonal communication is left to suffer. Parents stop talking to their children, spouses tune out their partners and immerse themselves in their communication toys, and you try to talk on your cell phone, listen to the radio, browse on the Internet, and send a fax while you’re driving your car down a busy highway. Meanwhile, you don’t pay attention while you’re driving and you get in an accident and kill your kids in the back seat. It’s time to start communicating less with the world and more with our families!
    On the local level, the greatest change I have seen in Medina County during my lifetime is the decreasing sense of community that is occurring. It’s ironic that as more people move into our community, we seem to know less and less people. The last vestiges of pre-1960’s Medina County are found at the local festivals like the Chatham Apple Butter Festival and Lodi Sweet Corn Festival. That’s about the only time anymore when I feel like I belong to a tight-knit community. I can’t include the County Fair in that list anymore, because I can spend a whole day there and not see anyone I recognize.
    Don’t get me wrong, I really try not to be this cynical, but the news media keeps telling me that us unfortunate Generation Xers are a bunch of cynical slackers who don’t appreciate what our parents’ generation have provided us. Maybe all this “propaganda” is starting to sink in.
    After all, I was born in 1968 so I missed the 60’s scene, and anybody who watches the movies and TV will tell you that all the great works of artistic expression and philosophy happened back then. It seems kinds of funny that the 1960’s mantra of “Don’t trust anybody over 30” has now become “Don’t trust anybody under 30.”
    But alas, in ten or twenty years it will be the X Generation that will be writing the history books, and only time will tell what we will contribute to history. Hopefully it will be a peaceful time with our government totally out of debt. We’ll see.
    But quite frankly, it concerns me what will happen when the Baby Boomers start retiring. Am I going to have to fork over 75% of my income in taxes so the Baby Boomers can collect Social Security, golf every day, and have a second home down in Florida? I find it disheartening that the projected date that Social Security will go bankrupt is within a couple years of when I am supposed to start collecting. Darn, if only I was born twenty years earlier!
    But to be more serious, this really is a great time to be alive. The advances that have occurred on the past thirty years are remarkable, and who can predict how advanced we will become in the year 2030. I just hope that people remember what it is to be human -- to love others, to give to others, to be honest to others, and to be true to ourselves. Those are the greatest accomplishments that can happen, and the great thing about them is that they don’t take any money or technical mastery.
    It’s just a part of being human.