Our Amazing World

As a child, I thought I lived in the modern World. During World War II, I wrote to my cousin Richard, fighting in Europe, and the letters flew over the Atlantic in less than a week. In World War I, Hobbs, New Mexico, did not hear of the end of the war until two weeks after the Armistice and the guns fell silent

Oh! We were very up-to-date. We didn’t have a telephone, but our neighbor did. When something happened that was really important, we used her phone to call my grandmother.

Long distance calls were expensive and reserved for major emergencies, like when a call came from West Texas that Uncle Dick’s horse fell and punctured his intestines. My parents called back to say they were leaving immediately, hoping to get there before he died. He survived and lived for another 60 years.

Last week, as I left the doctor’s office, my cell phone rang. My brother Don, who lives here in Garland, Texas, half a mile from the medical center, told me, “I just saw on Fox News that a plane from Aero Club Airport in Naperville, Illinois, crashed onto a third-story building.”

My daughter lives in Aero Club Estates in Naperville. Her husband keeps his plane in a hanger in their backyard, and he flies out of that private airstrip. I called Martha. When I told her there had been a crash, she said, “What?” I’d heard about it in Texas before she did, even though she was less than a mile away – almost close enough to hear the crash.

Later she e.mailed me that the airstrip was there long before the three-story building was erected just off the runway. The plane failed to gain enough altitude before hitting a tower on top of the building. There was no fire. Fireman put ladders up to the roof and rescued two people. The pilot, a neighbor, broke both legs and was released from the hospital later that day. His wife, also a friend of Martha and Don, was badly injured and remained in the hospital.

On Sunday my son David called from California. I asked if he heard about the plane crash in his sister’s neighborhood. He said, “Just a minute.” Maybe 90 seconds later he said, “I found pictures on the internet. I’ll send them to you.”

Two minutes later on my computer in Texas I had pictures sent from California of the plane crash in Illinois.

This is an amazing World. With cameras on cell phones everywhere, news travels around the World instantly. There are no secrets. The government can’t hide what is going on in Afghanistan. That’s good.

A home invasion in Connecticut and old ladies in small towns in Texas lock their doors and go to bed afraid. A child is abducted in California and mothers all over the country get in their cars and take their children to school, afraid to let them walk three blocks alone. Nineteen Arabs crash into the towers in New York, and people in Iowa don’t want Turks building a mosque in their small town. Living in fear is not so good.