The Clubhouse

Throughout most of my childhood my grandparents had a clubhouse in the back yard. It was nothing elaborate, just a few sheets of plywood held together by a few dozen nails and two by fours. At least that is what it appeared to be to a legion of cousins, siblings and friends. This clubhouse served as a spaceship, mountain cabin, aircraft carrier, battleship (The USS New Jersey to be exact) and my personal favorite, an Old West fort.

Oh the hunts we embarked on! The marauders we defended against! The new planets we explored! With that little pile of lumber we became astronauts, sailors, cowboys and mountain men. We went after elk in the Rocky Mountains, sailed the Pacific during the Second World War and explored that little slice of heaven between New York and California. Yes, we traveled the world and went places we had only seen on TV and read about in books.

Whenever someone washed a car on our street we would rush down to the end of the cul de sac and use the water to build our own Panama Canal. Just on the other side of the Canal was Lincoln Acres Elementary School, which served as Jack Murphy Stadium, Yankee Stadium and if we hit a ball into the iceplants, Wrigley Field. Beyond our field of dreams lay the wilderness land; or the Canyon at the intersection of Euclid Avenue and 24th street. Many a snake and lizard were corralled as I tapped into my inner Steve Irwin.

At the edge of our little canyon wilderness was a foreboding concrete tunnel that would take us under the 805 and on towards the Sweetwater River. That river led to San Diego Bay, which leads to the Pacific Ocean, which in turn leads to the rest of the world.

I often tell my sons stories of my childhood; always looking for ways of teaching them a lesson. One evening we were leaving Petco Park and Trevor asked me about the train tracks and where they lead. He also asked about the huge Dole ships and it took off from there; before the night was over we had gone on Google Earth and Trevor knew how to locate all seven continents on an unmarked map. Unfortunately, that’s one of the only benefits of new technology.

When I weigh the benefits against the negatives I have come to one conclusion: we as a people are forgetting how to be human. Social networking often exposes people who seem to take pride in allowing someone or something else to think for them. How many profiles out there have more “shared” quotes from “Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat” lady than actual words of their own? I have online friends who I had not heard from in years and it was nice to get back in touch with them. At least it was at first. Then one game request after another started coming in. Thank God for the app block option. When this wouldn’t do I would block game invites from the person or just delete the person altogether. While it was nice to get back in touch it became evident that I was no longer a human to that particular person; I was just another way to get points on AngryCandyFarmBirds or whatever other soul-sucking trendy game is out there.

Sadly, I have looked over profiles and seen months of shared meme’s and no personal words or thoughts. This tells me that people are allowing Facebook to think for them. Why else would they rarely if ever share their own thoughts? And when they do, it’s little more than “lol” or some other such lazy form of expression. 

A few weeks ago a coworker of mine told me that his three year old son knew how to use an iPhone better than he did. Not only are adults slowly but surely allowing technology to think for them; we are now teaching our kids the same dependence on technology and less on self-reliance.

How many kids know how to skin their knee climbing a tree? How many of you moms have found lizard and/or frog parts in your sons’ pockets when doing laundry? More important, how many of you freak out when they get a little bit of dirt on them yet don’t bat an eye when they’re running around singing Miley Cyrus or God forbid, songs containing grammar rooted in prison culture? I’ve felt for a long time that our collective use of technology has us forgetting how to simply be human and the past ten years have been more counter-productive than ever. Not one of us had an iPhone in 2003 and now many of us cannot live without one. And the cycle is repeated each time a new phone is released.

Here in San Diego the opportunities to figuratively travel the world are too numerous to count. The Zoo, museums, Sea World and nearly every bioclimatic region on the planet can be experienced. Sadly, when I take my children to experience these things I see people paying more attention to their phones than to their children and the experiences they are attempting to share. One day while at the Zoo I observed a little girl of about three or four asking her mom about a particular turtle.The mother responded with an irritated “Shhhhhhh!” and went right back to playing whatever game she was playing on her phone.

If you have kids, don’t let their minds rot with technology. Build them a clubhouse and if you don’t have the means, take them outside somewhere, anywhere. There are many resources all over town for this and all it will cost is a few bucks worth of gas. Let them learn how to imagine rather than allowing technology to imagine for them. The time is coming when no matter what the emotion or situation, someone will tell you “There’s an app for that.” And quite frankly, I hope my time on this Earth is over before that happens…