Who’s afraid of a little life-altering change?

By Patricia Hunt
Published: August 22, 2008

One hundred years ago. Jesse Hayden left rural Davidson County, N.C., went to the nearest town of any size and bought a tiny telephone company. The telephone was the cutting-edge technology of the era. He sent for my grandfather to join him in High Point, where he could have a job with North State Telephone. My grandfather went and worked there for the rest of his life.
Vilas Lee Hunt was born in 1886 and was part of a generation that saw everything they grew up with change.
Outdoor privies were replaced with indoor toilets. The way you got water changed from a well with a pump in the yard to water lines run into the house with spigots.  Heating changed from coal-burning fireplaces to oil circulators to a coal-fired furnace for central heat. Cooking changed from a wood stove to gas and electric ranges. Transportation changed from horses to automobiles. Communications changed from person-to-person exchanges and the telegraph to telephones — and the phones themselves kept changing. Refrigeration changed from ice boxes to electric refrigerators. Lighting went from oil lamps and later gas to electricity.
There was not one feature of everyday life that remained the same. Even clothing saw a dramatic change after World War I from Victorian styles to clothing that is not too different from much of our clothing today.
One hundred years later, we are in the midst of a similar shift. Transportation, communication, heating and cooling, lighting — nearly every feature of daily life is going to change. Either the United States will be on the cutting edge along with a lot of other countries who are developing new technology or we will be like people defending travel by horse, lighting with oil lamps and cooking on wood stoves.
From what I read, we are already behind. The hybrid car was developed and marketed by Toyota while Detroit was cranking out Hummers, pickup trucks and SUVs. Little Denmark has pioneered big changes in the way people accomplish everyday life with the least expenditure of resources devoted to energy. China is putting resources to alternative energy.
Being challenged to change how we do things is not a new experience for humankind. It has happened over and over again. The generation born in the 1880s saw every way they lived change. They embraced it.
My grandfather was teaching in a one-room school when he got the invitation from Jesse Hayden to join North State Telephone Company. He didn’t hesitate and wait to see if the phone was going to amount to anything. He didn’t hang around breeding horses or making buggies. He went to town and faced the future. Why is the United States so slow to embrace the future? We are going to get killed out there if we don’t, and yet we hesitate. We diddle. We don’t want to invest in the research. Why are we quicker to go to war than to go to the lab to do the hard work necessary to find new ways of doing things that simply have to be done?
Once upon a time we were bold. We were audacious. We said we were going to the moon, and from the announcement of the goal to the landing was only eight years. Now we seem to be driven more by fear of what might go wrong than a vision of what might go right.
To me, the “greatest generation” was the generation of my grandparents simply because they had the most dramatic changes to deal with, but the next generation got through the Depression and World War II. The generation of the 50s built the interstate highway system; no one said we couldn’t afford it. In the 60s we changed race relations and went to the moon. From the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education to a black candidate for president was 54 years. We did that! WE did that. Americans. Whoever wins this election, We the People need to demand that we take inspiration and courage from our ancestors and face the future with bold determination. It will call for sacrifice and it won’t be easy, but what is? I want our grandchildren to look back at us with gratitude and admiration because we tackled the enormous challenges of our day. We can be the greatest generation.
I remember a photo of every employee of North State Telephone Company, from the president to the linemen. Taken outside, some men were hanging from a telephone pole and the rest were standing around it. They numbered fewer than 20, but look what they started. And most of them had never traveled more than a few miles from home. Surely we have what it takes if we can get over fearing what we have to lose and envision what we have to gain. 
Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.