Monday, October 4, 2010

My not-very-well-thought-out post on how Henry Ford is partially responsible for the decline of the American Family.

This rant surfaces in my brain every now and then, so today I thought I'd share:

The automobile: Modern convenience or Destroyer of Families?


I'm going with Destroyer of Families - here's why:


See, this lovely family is all sitting down to a wonderful dinner lovingly prepared by (I assume) Mom. Note everyone is clean and washed and there is nothing to distract from dinner conversation. Everyone shares their daily experiences and hopes for the future.

Enter the drive-through:




Those lovely family sit-down dinners have been replaced by this:



We don't even sit in the "restaurant" when we get the fast food - it's quicker to just drive through and eat it on your way to wherever it is you're going. I confess I am very guilty of this activity.

Modern times have given us wonderful inventions and a better lifestyle, but sometimes I wonder why we have to take the bad with the good.

2 comments:

Danielle said...

One of my favourite quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides in his book 'Middlesex':

"Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds."

Hannah said...

I like Danielle's point/quote very much.

We forget what is most important because we ALLOW ourselves to become distracted. Or maybe we crave the distraction 'coz we believe it to be more entertaining than what sits in the living room.