Think small — challenge of the 21st Century

I grew up in a small house. Once a cottage, the expanded house was still small. My sisters and I slept in the same room until I was about 16 and took over one of the other small cottages. Our house had no basement or central heating, and for years only the bathroom had a real door. I can still hear the reassuring, peaceful rumble of the oil burning space heater.

Do I feel deprived? Never did and do not now. The house provided warmth, a coziness you simply cannot find anywhere in 4,000 square feet. We were with family most of the time. We learned to provide space for one another, to get along. No one had to teach us how to share. No one could rush away in a sniffling huff and slam a door for emphasis. Want to be alone? Go walk the Lake Michigan beach. Oddly, anyone who did that returned in a near spiritual stillness.

The house was the product of two people who had just survived the Great Depression, and for me I believe it fundamentally prepared me for the 21^st Century. After all, the last 40 years of the 20^th Century failed to prepare us for what we face today, which, in essence, is a growing need to expand our lives within littler spaces (contradiction intended).

I feel sad for those who are “making do” or “doing the best we can” within “reduced” circumstances. Oh, the misery, the shame, the blushing humiliation. They need to get over it. If their self-definitions hinged upon the size of their homes – which is the case for too many – then they must find authentic substance for their personal meaning. Imagine the emptiness of a life based on floor space, places to avoid interacting with others, and personal space measured by the yard.

Besides, a large house must have multi-door garages, kidney shaped swimming pools, lawn care contracts, security systems, and fences intimidating enough to discourage intrusions – the costs of which further reduce your circumstances. Do you really need a “conversation” corner? How about the “sitting room?” If you have an agonizing need for a sitting room, well, you might consider extensive mental health therapy. What you are avoiding may not be that scary. On the other hand, perhaps you just opened the insurance bill for the backyard pool. Zowie.

While sitting, consider your many alternatives to the lifestyle shackling you to an empty idea.

Reduced circumstances may well be good for us. All of us. Reduced circumstances force us to examine our lives and explore our many options. Maybe – now pull your seatbelts tight – maybe space mortgages our futures and prevents choices which might be more eloquent. Just for starters, interaction with those we live with could be better than subsidizing our inability to relate to others. At a very critical level, we might begin to realize that spending money on things prevents us from acquiring and absorbing experience. What a concept. Experiencing the sitting room is a poor substitute for getting more education or seeing the pyramids.

The ultimate self-insult has become the rented storage garage. All the booty of our self-absorbed lifestyles that we cannot part with (but no longer serves us) goes into an out-of-sight aluminum alloy hidey hole. There the stuff no longer burdens our consciousness. It steadily pecks at our checking account and diminishes our options.

The strategy to exploit, to explore small space is universal. Most of us face the same challenge: How to live and flourish with less. Alas, you are not just surviving or managing your lives; you are designing lives and discovering ways to thrive.

Even today, when our family gets together, we crowd into a small space and talk. We can reach out and tap someone without getting up and reaching. Getting someone to pass the mustard is a challenge only because you must interrupt a long conversation to get a word in there somewhere. Only my mother will see you need mustard without being told. Mothers are like that. The intuitive notice comes equipped with a warning not to put mustard where you do not want it. It stains.

Alert! Alert! Alert! Don’t panic, just watch

Here’s a chance to watch something happen and learn something, too. Learn what? Well, that’s it. We don’t know what we’ll learn, but we will learn something about people, the media, and a bit about government.

At 2 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 9, the government will conduct its first national test of the national Emergency Alert System (EAS), and there is some concern on the part of government that people might take the test seriously, grab the family Bible, and drive the rusting pickup truck deep into the woods where presumably they will hide until the aliens leave the planet.

If you think that’s a joke, it is. Sorry. Perhaps I overstate it. However, you should remember the public’s reaction to Orson Welles’ 1938 Mercury Theater of the Air’s broadcast of War of the Worlds. People did jump out of buildings. They did report large, creeping dark smoke approaching their homes. They did grab the family Bible, the shotgun from over the door, and drive into the woods. People were assaulted. About two weeks later a posse had to trek into the Rocky Mountains to convince a few to come home.

You might imagine the possibilities here.

“EAS participants provide a critical public service to the nation as the resilient backbone of alert and warning when all other means of communication are unavailable,” says a FEMA web site. “EAS Participants include all broadcasters, satellite and digital radio and television, cable television and ‘wireline’ video providers who ensure the system is at a constant state of readiness.”

Readers with questions should visit the FEMA site. Lots of blah, blah, blah awaits. I do not know what a “wireline video provider” is.

Other than the obvious, there are essentially two concerns. First, the government has not publicized the test very well – I have not seen or heard anything about it, for example – and, second, there seems to be confusion about how it will be presented, how long it will last, and what, if any, warning it will provide.

“This system test is the first of its kind,” says an email to federal employees. “It is designed to broadcast a nationwide message to the American public. Nothing like it has been conducted in the history of the country. There have been tests in the past but none to all parts of the nation at the same time. The test will run concurrently on all radio and TV band and the message will run for three minutes. Most messages in the past were anywhere from 30 seconds to one minute.”

Please note the 30 seconds versus the three minutes.

“There is great concern in local police and emergency management circles about undue public anxiety over this test,” the email report continues. “The test message on TV might not indicate that it is just a test. Fear is that the lack of an explanation message might create panic.”

What will we learn? One TV station can visually present it in a different way than the next one on the dial. I can guarantee confusion. And among radio listeners and television viewers out there, especially at that time of day, people will react differently. Someone will panic. The media’s countless ways to publicize or explain it offer lots of uncertainty.

Not far below the surface, I am a social-psychologist. I watch people, constantly trying to learn how people respond to unusual or unexpected stimuli.

I add one bit of experience here, and that is the media knows if you warn people too far in advance, people forget it. If you tell the public a day in advance, they remember it, especially if you remind them again on the right day. This applies to everything from a special city council meeting to a rescheduled football game. Let’s see if it applies to a nationwide alert.