As many of you already know, I spend a good deal of time at my property in Virginia on the weekends when I am not working.

I am usually in Sparta through the week and some on the weekends, but going to the mountain place gives me a little taste of serenity. There is no phone and the place is located at the end of a gated driveway with a good barrier of woods in between.

There are no lights, but I recently put in a gas heater and cook stove and I have a plethora of candles and oil lamps. There is also no water at this time, but there is sewer service. To use the toilet, I have to carry in water from a friend's house who lives nearby. That isn't too bad.

I am used to carrying water from when I was a kid. We moved into a place that had an outdoor toilet, a coal stove and a spring house. We also had chickens, pigs and cows.

If you weren't toting coal and water and feed, you were toting yourself out to the "little bank on the hillside to make a deposit," as my father used to say. We had lots of walking to do and now that I look back, I slept better and felt much better than I do now. A little bit of old-timey living never hurt anyone, but a whole lot could probably kill. I don't think I am properly prepared to live in the old ways, should the modern ways be gone some day.

Society reminds me of these animals that they rescue from poachers and such in Africa and then raise in a cage. Later, they try to let the animals loose in the forests that they most likely came from. I venture to say that most of our society would perish if released into the forests from whence we came. We have been softened by warm furnaces and a service-oriented economy. You don't need to find food in order to eat it, you just stop by a restaurant and someone throws it out the window at you. A feeding station, if you will.

Living the old way was much more of a challenge. Finding food and using rudimentary tools isn't an easy way to make a living. Cleaning up out of a bucket of cool water is another thing that recently reminded me of how easy I usually have it. I am used to hot running water and all of the other amenities.

I would be willing to bet that some of our ancestors would have been pretty darn happy just to get their hands on the metal bucket. What a miracle that would have been: A device to carry water in that is very hard to break, which can also be heated over a fire to cook in. That is one thing that is lost in this era of convenience: appreciation of the little things. We do not appreciate the tools and technology that help us live with such ease.

From the modern car to the computer, from the electric light to the automatic heater, our lives are easier now than ever before in history. Not to say that it is all bad - giant leaps forward in medicine alone would be enough to give new technology a thankful nod.

But culturally, the decline of western civilization must be at least partially lain on the doorstep of technology and its result, the abstract nature of our society. Before the technological revolution, the ties binding the family and the community together were stronger. Today, we are separated from one another by communications on computers, telephones and even through fax. These modes are more and more replacing the face to face conversation. Through this change, the handshake is eliminated. The hug is destroyed. Eye contact is no more.

I think people were more likely to try and work with society in the past than they are today. One of the biggest fears in history was being ostracized by your peers, or thrown out of the village, never to return. A good deal of that had to do with the fact that most humans hunted, farmed and worked together for the betterment of their communities. An individual could not survive in the wilds without tools or provisions. But the wilds are gone and those days have ended.

People today ostracize themselves from society. What does this tell us? With new methods of communication, our outlooks certainly change a great deal. In my opinion, it is much easier to do ill to those whom you have never seen or touched. You would never harm your friends or neighbors in the old days, because you never knew when you might need to build a barn. Today, you can just get on the phone and call up the contractor to come and erect one for you. So who cares about the neighbors now?

It is a real shame. I can say that I have very nice neighbors, but I think here in Alleghany and the surrounding mountain communities we have the benefit of being a few years behind the rest of the world. Sadly, it seems we are catching up faster all the time in trends and culture. Will our values also follow the world's pattern of decline? We can only wonder and hope that they do not. But it is worthy of note that even here some types of crime are on the rise. For a good number of these ills I blame the television, our great role model. It tells us all how to act and dress. It teaches us what we should want out of life, what we should expect and how we should react to it.

We see violence and sex, drugs and perverse morality. But the problem doesn't stop with the adult shows. As a case in point, I was watching a Walt Disney movie not long ago and noticed that even the families there show signs of trouble - irreverent youth who do not respect their parents, people lying to one another, general disrespect among characters. But, unlike the old days, these traits were not displayed among the "bad guys." These were characteristics of the main players in the movie. What has the world come to when a family can't watch a Disney movie without worrying about what their kids are learning? I have also seen The Lion King movie, which also shows young lions (kids), who happen to be the main players in the movie, showing disrespect for the adult lions (parents). But everything works out in the end, right? Not in the real world, little lion. I say bring back Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows.

I suppose I have ranted and raved enough for one week, but all this tension has led me to want to go back out into the woods for a while longer.

Perhaps I should do society a favor and ostracize myself. Then again, diversity is the spice of life; at least that's what the diverse are apt to say. I suppose I would call myself on the diverse end of things, especially since I decline to be enticed by the powers of network television.

Seriously, I don't know if we can reverse the downward dive of society, but we can change our little part.

A good start would be turning off the television and the computer for an evening and just having a long talk with each other. I wonder how much difference that could make?

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