- ON INTERSTATE 80 IN NORTHERN NEW JERSEY
(AP) -- In a realm where few want to slow down, he stops. As other cars
barrel toward New York City, he calmly backs his into the foliage that
separates the two coursing forks of I-80. He has come to watch people hurry.
-
- New Jersey State Police Trooper John
Salamone knows fast, resents fast, tries to prevent fast. Just west of
the most frenetic town of all, on one of the busiest stretches of one of
the busiest roads, he polices a rush-hour parade.
-
- He switches on his radar, and as trucks,
cars, sport-utility vehicles pass the 55-mph sign, the LED readout clocks
each. 66. 69. 73. 77. Hurtling toward Hackensack. 67. 71. 76. Pushing toward
Parsippany. 80. 69. 74. 86. Flying toward Fort Lee. Drivers cutting off
drivers, tailgating, passing on the shoulder.
-
- Each with a foot on the gas and a century
of hurry in the rearview mirror.
-
- "That really frightens me, when
you see how oblivious people are,'' Salamone laments. A Lexus whooshes
by. "This overwhelming desire to get from A to B, it's madness.''
-
- A hundred-year madness. The 20th century:
It started with horses and hours. It ends with Maseratis and microseconds,
with cars speeding across highways, airplanes streaking across skies, microprocessors
burning across desktops and magnificent metal birds called Discovery and
Endeavour and Columbia circling the earth. This century's mad dash of innovation
has produced all of these things -- and the most frantic human era ever.
-
- We phone. We fax. We page. We e-mail.
We stuff day planners. We race from one end of life to the other, rarely
glancing over our shoulders. Technology, mass media and a desire to do
more, do it better and do it yesterday have turned us into a world of hurriers.
-
- "Don't look back,'' the baseball
pitcher Satchel Paige once said. "Something might be gaining on you.''
-
- In these jumbled days, something probably
is.
-
- Stop and smell the roses? No more. Instead,
better wake up and smell the coffee. What an exhilarating, exhausting world
we've created in our haste to create a world we can manage.
-
- A world of seven-day diets and 24-hour
news channels and one-hour photo processing and 30-minute pizza delivery
and 10-minute facials and two-minute warnings and Minute Rice.
-
- Fast food. Fast computers. Fast cars
in fast lanes. (Or, if you prefer, rapid transit.) And Nestle Quik and
Quik Marts and quick-cut commercials. A superhero faster than a speeding
bullet and a bullet train faster than a speeding car. VCRs with five fast-forward
settings. Sound bites and the rat race and instant coffee and microwave
popcorn and radio stations that make a breathless promise: "You give
us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world.''
-
- And now a brief pause -- but only for
station identification.
-
- Get rich quick. Get fast-tracked. Get
your 15 minutes of fame. Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.
Run on empty. Just do it.
-
- "Most people are trying to figure
out what it is that they need to do. Before they even get up in the morning,
they feel like the day's half over,'' says Joan DesCombes, a Florida interior
designer who helps busy people streamline their homes.
-
- About this time a century ago, America
was still a rural nation.
-
- Meals could take entire afternoons to
prepare; trips into town ate up whole days. Those with telephones made
calls by turning a crank and dialing "central'' to connect them.
-
- Yet people were already openmouthed at
life's fast pace. A man named Simon Newcombe looked back at the 19th century
and observed: "A beggar today riding in a boxcar can travel faster
than a king could 100 years ago.''
-
-
- Then, everything accelerated. The innovations
in transportation alone boggle the mind:
-
- "1903: the first speed limit (England,
20 mph).
-
- "1908: the Ford Model T, top speed
45 mph (speeded-up assembly-line manufacturing began in 1913).
-
- "1911: the world's earliest air-mail
delivery (in India).
-
- "1933: the Boeing 247 (600 miles
in four hours).
-
- "1947: Test pilot Chuck Yeager breaks
the sound barrier (700 mph).
-
- "1969: Apollo 10's three astronauts
become the fastest humans ever (24,791 mph).
-
- And consider this standard of speed:
a North Atlantic crossing. By sea, the leisurely old-fashioned method,
the liner SS United States set the record in 1952 with a trip of 3 days,
10 hours, 40 minutes.
-
- By air, Charles Lindbergh took 33 1/2
hours in 1927. In 1976, the supersonic plane Concorde cut that to three
hours (1,453 mph).
-
- Quick transit begetting quick access
begetting quicker, busier, more compressed lives.
-
- "No century has been like this.
And we're only speeding up,'' says David Grubin, producer of the recent
PBS documentary "America 1900.'' To him, fast often means progress:
"We're always complaining about the pace of life, but prosperity and
speed go together.''
-
- What caused it all? Was it the Industrial
Revolution, which automated tasks, created a vast off-the-farm labor force
and infused the twin dreams of Bigger and Better into American life? Was
it the urbanization that brought heartland job-seekers and northward-migrating
blacks and foreign immigrants pouring into spaces too small for them, racing
to build the national industrial behemoth and catch the American dream?
-
- Was it the technology? The radio and
the telephone, which transmitted the human voice instantaneously? The movie,
which condensed life into a fast-moving tale? Or the microchip, whose speed,
according to Moore's Law, doubles every 18 months and makes us view gadget
efficiency as a birthright?
-
- It was all of the above -- vast forces
working together, condensing life, collapsing events into one big glob
of Franklin Planner complexity.
-
- "My dad was born in 1897. And he
moved from a farm in the Central Valley of California to Los Angeles in
a covered wagon. And then he sat there in his living room and watched guys
walk on the moon. I don't know how his mind held both of those events,''
says Carroll Pursell, a technology historian and author of "White
Heat,'' a book that examined the cultural impact of technology.
-
- "We're witnessing the annihilation
of time and space,'' Pursell says. "Who knows what it means?''
-
-
- Milestones from a hurried century (pared
down, of course, to keep this quick):
-
- * In 1922, Reader's Digest was founded
to give busy people the "nub'' of articles they wouldn't otherwise
have time to read.
-
- * The "Twentieth Century Limited,''
a luxury train said to "make New York a suburb of Chicago,'' covered
the 961 miles between the two cities in just 16 hours. It shut down, outdated
by airliners, on Dec. 2, 1967.
-
- * During the 1980s, when disc jockeys
played "oldies,'' they meant songs from the 1950s. Today, "oldies''
can be from 1990. Will we lap ourselves?
-
- * In 1968, in an allegorical episode
of the original "Star Trek,'' Captain Kirk encounters a species whose
existence is far faster-paced than humans'. But there is a price. "At
this level, they are easily damaged,'' Kirk says, "as if accelerated
living burns them out.''
-
- * In Japan, the modern era has coined
two new words: "karoshi'' and "karojisatsu'' -- death from overwork
and suicide from overwork.
-
- * In 1998, 65 million Americans subscribed
to wireless services such as pagers and cell phones, according to the Cellular
Telecommunications Industry Association.
-
- * And right now, labs in New Mexico,
California and New York are competing to build the fastest computer ever
-- one that performs more than 1 trillion calculations per second. That's
equivalent to every person on Earth doing 200 sums on a pocket calculator.
-
- All in that same second.
-
- A year after it began overnight deliveries
in 1973, Federal Express was handling 4,000 of them on an average day.
In 1998, the company delivers 3 million packages across the globe, dispatching
them in a post-postal way that would have made Benjamin Franklin's head
spin. But even overnight has its shortcomings.
-
- "Sometimes the next morning by 10:30
isn't fast enough,'' says Jim Lyski, the company's vice president of marketing.
So three years ago, the company introduced "First Overnight'' - delivery
by 8:30 a.m. But...
-
- "Sometimes early morning delivery
isn't fast enough,'' says Lyski. So same-day delivery was born. And yet...
-
- "Sometimes six days a week isn't
enough,'' says Lyski. So last year came the next step: Sunday delivery.
-
- Federal Express, by the way, has been
painting its trucks with its new name: FedEx. Those extra syllables, it
seems, took too long to say.
-
- People do recognize this kind of hurry
in their lives. They talk of fixing it, but they don't have the time. A
survey conducted for Hilton hotels found 71 percent of Americans think
time is moving too quickly, but only half of them would slow down if they
could. And even fewer - 43 percent - don't think thinning their packed
schedules would make them happier.
-
- Even the fastest man around - DC Comics'
"The Flash'' - is having trouble keeping up. When he was conceived
in the 1940s, The Flash could race at four, maybe five times the speed
of sound. Today, he can almost catch light. But even that's not enough.
-
- "The world's overtaking him,'' says
Mark Waid, who writes the stories that are made into "Flash'' comic
books. "It becomes increasingly harder to come up with real-world
superspeed stunts for this character to do. I recently had him try to outrace
a modem signal from computer to computer.''
-
- Can we slow down? Is it still possible?
-
- Well, there's always baseball "
the patient pastime and official evoker of Elysian-field relaxation. But
has it, too, been supplanted by the video-age spectacles of pro basketball
and pro hockey?
-
- After watching one game of the 1997 World
Series, a decidedly impatient Commissioner Bud Selig was heard to say,
"The `Unfinished Symphony' had a better chance of finishing before
that game last night.''
-
-
- Hello. This is your blood pressure speaking.
Why not consider letting that tension ebb out of you for a while? How about
a nice, deep, oil-saturated back rub. Or perhaps aromatherapy. Some nice
scented candles, plush pillows, a nice down comforter. How does that sound?
-
- Here's a book to help you relax. It's
by Anne Wilson Schael. It's called "Meditations for Women Who Do Too
Much.''
-
- "Feeling overwhelmed isn't surprising,''
she'll tell you. "Being surprised about it is.''
-
- Or how about a slow walk through the
Pennsylvania woods? A gentle snow falling on the crisp leaves of late autumn.
Squirrels meandering up old oaks. Slow, deep breaths of clear air. Stroll,
maybe, with the Rev. Geoff Kohler of Marketplace Community Church in suburban
Philadelphia, who has started to preach about the virtues of slow.
-
- "I went for a walk the other day,
and I made myself walk slow,'' he'll tell you. "I walked three miles
in 2 1/2 hours. ... I was completely relaxed and refreshed. I came back
feeling so good.''
-
- But his is a family of athletes, he said,
and their response was different: "They told me that my body missed
all the benefits by not going fast.''
-
- Keep walking -- forward, just a little
more now. What's that in the distance? A fence?
-
- And just beyond it? An interstate?
-
- Cars moving faster than any human did
in 1900. Eighteen-wheelers roaring along. Caffeinated drivers push, push,
pushing from Point A to Point B as their counterparts across the median
whiz from B right back to A.
-
- So much for getting away from it all.
-
- Not a chance. We're busy beings, we 20th
century humans. Places to go, people to meet, planners to fill, files to
download, shows to tape, bills to pay, planes to catch, frozen dinners
to nuke, Web sites to surf, kids to pick up, stress to manage, thromboses
to have, speeding tickets to pay. Gotta move on.
-
- Twentieth century's about over, folks.
Hurry along, now. Nothing more to see here.
|
