Living In The Jetsons
“Some people see things and ask why? I dream of things that never were and say why not.” G.B. Shaw
“… change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.” Socrates
Remember the time of TVs? — The printed TV guide arriving in the mailbox — Leafing through the thin paper and cheap print in anticipation — Circling your favorite shows?
The airtime scheduled for my favorite shows would dictate my plans. I didn’t have many — neither shows nor plans. So, there was no way I would miss watching The Flintstones.
Growing up in Germany, child relevant TV shows were limited to late afternoons. Before 5pm there was literally nothing on either of our two TV stations. AT 7:30 the news came on, a cue for anyone under the age of 10 to go to their room and get ready for bed. But, within those two hours and 30 minutes my world opened up.
Sitting on the couch in our small apartment, situated at the edges of a grey small town near a bigger grey industrial city, I felt alive and hopeful. The TV, exactly as old as I was, served as a portal, my personal rabbit hole to Wonderland. On Tuesdays,The Flintstones took me back in time. The Jetsons transported me to the future on Thursdays. Wednesdays, I watched I dream of Jeannie, envying her for her seamless ability to appear and disappear while always looking good — hair and eyelashes in ever-perfect condition. Our TV was my bottle.
2020, Year of the Pandemic, felt like a long Wednesday for me. With the stay-at-home order, we were each directed to disappear into our bottles. We didn’t look as good as Jeannie, and the process of going inward was messier, but we had neither practice nor reference points. We weren’t trained as Jeannies. Rather we came into the lockdown straight from our Tuesday-world of The Flintstones. Viewed from that perspective, we transitioned pretty well.
Just like Jeannie’s and Alice’s, 2020, for me, was a liminal space — a space of endless possibility, a space of messiness and overwhelm, a space situated in the intangible zone between the past and the future. Our pandemic imposed Wednesday gave us Zoom, the magic portal that connected us while keeping us physically safe as we looked at photos and heard audio from Mars. In the tangible world, racial injustice moved to the foreground; our democracy was kicked and tested; NFTs were traded; billionaires were made, and the need for climate change was more urgently expressed. The cost: struggle, suffering and death outside the magic bottle.
While during 2019 l inhabited the Tuesday world of The Flintstones and while 2020 was our time in the magic bottle, 2021 feels like my childhood Thursday world of The Jetsons.
In today’s world of living the once imagined future, even as my head is spinning with excitement, I find myself clenching to the familiarity of my family sofa.
This new world seems to defy the gravitational pull of the timeless familiar we experienced in The Flintstones, a pull that we could readily escape by disappearing into Jeannie’s magic bottle. My curiosity and excitement about the world of The Jetsons, to which Gulliver-like we so quickly arrived, is tempered by tentative emotion and by feeling somewhat overwhelmed.
A very strong part of me is holding on to the enveloping comfort of my figurative family sofa. I am afraid that if I let go, I will float in space completely without context or meaning. This is not liminality: Rather, it is an existential response to dread of the void. I am afraid I will lose myself in a world I do not know — yet. At the same time, I feel the tension that this figurative sofa creates in my body. It pulls me down, exhausts me, almost as if Fred Flintstone had tied a rock to George Jetson’s aerocar.
My mind circles, wondering how can I live in The Jetsons’ world, one that obeys different laws and follows different rules, when every cell in my body has been primed by the certainty and physicality of The Flintstones.
While on Zoom with a friend or new collaborator I find myself missing the smell of the coffee and the feel of the room we would have once shared. Just like Judy Jetson, I write in my digital diary but, unlike Judy, I miss the tactile experience of leafing through pages and feeling the tip of my pen rolling across paper.
Meanwhile, the news coming from my version of R.U.I.D.I., tells me about the contest for racial justice and an end to police brutality; It tells me about politicians being censured, indicted and impeached; It brings me a world of vaccines shared and Mars explored. In this onslaught of information, I feel small, drenched by the flood of content and overwhelmed by the immense volume of work that lies ahead. I experience impatience with the slow-seeming tempo of social change, and yet deluged by the drastic changes in our organizing paradigm.
If only we could collectively flip a switch as effortlessly as I did on our family TV, moving from past, to magic transformation, to future as naturally as day turns to night, but then, if we could just turn the switch, we would miss out on the messiness of the process.
I know that I am acutely tethered to the time of nature. Like a tree that grows almost imperceptibly, I feel as out of context in this new world as The Jetsons appeared to be during my childhood TV Thursdays. I can stretch my mind to this Jetsons reality, but my behaviour rooted in cellular memory is less elastic.
It is difficult to tend to those small internal changes in belief, behaviour and habit that I gained in the bottle, when the world that surrounds us now moves so fast. I do feel a desire to hold onto the couch that connects me to gravity, and allows me to attend more easily to these glimmers of understanding, but I am no longer in the bottle; I’m living in the world of The Jetsons, and when I give my fears a moment’s rest, I get off my couch, feel the new rhythm and step out into our new world. There is no way I would miss The Jetsons.
