[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]The virtue of standing still is that change is all that easier to see.
For those of you wondering, I still don’t have a cell phone. There was a recent article in The New York Times discussing us conscientious resisters , or whatever term they coined. According to the newspaper piece, about 85 percent of American adults have cell phones. The rest of us are either too poor to afford them or have made a conscious decision not to have them. While I’m probably a member of the latter group, I feel like a member of the former group as well because I can’t just see shelling out a hundred-plus dollars a month for another telephone.
In my other life as a novelist, I write books that take place in the present day about regular folks with very tragic lives. When I started my current novel, I realized that if most Americans have cell phones, my characters probably should, too. Since I’ve never had one, it was difficult to pinpoint when cell phones went from being inconvenient bricks to ubiquitous must-have gadgets. According to my friends, that shift occurred sometime in 1999. Who knew ten years had passed that quickly? Although I’ll admit my Scrooged little mind gleefully counts the thousands of dollars I’ve saved compared to everyone I know who’s thrown their money at Verizon or the equivalent.
I’ve been thinking about this cell phone issue because people – and by people, I mean my friends and family – are frankly flabbergasted that I still don’t have a cell phone. Somehow, they thought, my husband and I would become converts the minute I got pregnant. No fewer than a dozen people have speculated – out loud – as to what in the heck I would do in an emergency.
First, I can’t imagine the kind of emergencies they think would befall me – but, for argument’s sake, I often ask. Then things get fuzzy. “What if you get stuck on the side of the road?” And when I’m not swayed by that, it’s “What if you get stuck in a bad neighborhood?” Now, I’ve already lived in the “bad” neighborhood. Let me tell you, South Central, or South L.A. as it was recently rebranded, was a fine place to live – for the most part – as long as I ignored the Beirut-style helicopter flyovers and absence of taxpayer-funded city services. I don’t spend much time down there these days, and I can’t imagine why I’d be stuck there – but if I was, I’d ask one of the lovely people there to call 911. Although in my time there, I’d never actually seen a cop respond to an emergency call, it could happen.
This Future Is Highly Unlikely
I don’t drive much, and can’t imagine being stuck on the road more than four miles from home, much less hundreds. But for all the worrywarts out there, I’d take advantage of collective action and borrow one of your cell phones – you’d lend it to me, right? – or use a land line from one of the zillion businesses in our strip mall-laden city that haven’t yet shut their doors during the Great Recession.
Believe me, the nagging hasn’t stopped there, despite my glib responses. Recently my sister-in-law proclaimed that I would be putting my soon-to-be-born child in jeopardy if I didn’t have a cell phone. She said that a playground emergency could quickly turn into a matter of life and death. In all honesty, I generally discount any advice from this sister-in-law because she’s often had her phone turned off for non-payment of service. (And I regret becoming her Facebook friend to appease my in-laws). But if I were to give her comments the gravity with which they were meant, I can’t imagine that the very life and death of children turns on whether their parents have a cell phone on the playground.
My most dire warning came just this week from a friend whom I credit with good sense and parenting skills. I got a very grave email from her after her five-year-old daughter broke her arm. The girl’s teachers didn’t send her to the school nurse or call an ambulance. Rather, they called my friend – who quickly rushed the child to the emergency room and got her broken arm set. Now, I will not question the wisdom of a school that’s charging over $16,000 a year in kindergarten tuition, and in their infinite wisdom left my friend’s injured daughter on the side of the playground to “shake it off.” Without her cell phone, she said, she would not have been there in time to rescue her daughter from the school’s dubious medical wisdom.
Beholden to Marketers
I would like to think that if my child were hurt that someone at some school, nursery, or day care, someone would have enough sense to take the child to the hospital if they couldn’t raise me or my husband (who both sit in front of desks all day) to come to the rescue. But I’m willing to chance it.
I don’t make these decisions lightly. I recognize that we live in a world swayed by marketing. Ninety-nine percent of the people I know have bought into the idea that they “need” a cell phone, like they “need” cable television, in-home childcare and luxury automobiles. Nevertheless, a corporatist’s dream is not my reality although I worry that my choices may come to be tomorrow’s poor parenting worthy of intervention. I’ve read about a New Jersey mother whose newborn was placed in state care after she refused a c-section, and another in Arizona who’s fighting with the local hospital board to give birth vaginally after a c-section with a prior birth. They may not be comparable now, but today’s birth choice issue may morph into tomorrow’s middle-class parenting paradigm.
I know that for my friends and family, their side of the cell phone divide with me and my husband on the other isn’t fun. Apparently, we’re no good at last-minute plans. They feel compelled to show up on time because they can’t call and tell us they’re showing up late.
But living on this end of the cell phone divide is no fun, either. Half the phone calls I get sound like 1970s overseas calls or 1980s satellite phone calls. Some of the time, I feel like I’m getting called from the war-torn Middle East half a world away instead of friends in Los Angeles, half a mile away – not to mention the incessant talking of everyone walking their children, their dogs, or both, or blindly blocking the market aisles as they weave from side to side. Plus, I have to spend far too much of my time in my own car avoiding those who haven’t taken kindly to California’s “hands-free” law and must avoid driving in front of, behind, or next to those who swerve and text at fifty miles per hour.
These are the dangers I worry about. If my choices are a cell phone- less universe, where I don’t have to avoid talkers who walk and drive without consequence, and my child’s emergency not being tended to immediately, I’ll pick the latter. It seems safer, and saner, that way.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
