Text A Quick Fix Society

So, when it was time to return to home outside of Philadelphia, I insisted that we take a different route. "Let's explore that countyside," I suggested. The two days it took us to make the return trip were filled with new experiences. We toured a Civil War battlefield and stood on the little hill that fifteen thousand Confederate soldiers had tried to take on another hot July afternoon,one hundred and twenty-five years ago, not knowing that half of them would get killed in the vain attempt. We drove slowly through main streets of sleepy Pennsylvania Dutch towns, slowing to twenty miles an hour so as not to crowd the horses and horse carriages on the their way to market. We admired toy trains and antique cars in country museums and saved 70 percent in factory outlets. We stuffed  ourselves with spicy salads and homemade bread in an "all-you-can-eat" farmhouse restaurant, then wandered outside to enjoy the sunshine and the herds of cows—no little dots this time—lying in it. And we returned home refreshed, revitalized, and reeducated. This time, getting there had been the fun.

Why is it that the featureless turnpikes and interstates are the routes of choice for so many of us? Why doesn't everybody try slowing down and exploring the countryside? But more and more, the fast lane seems to be the only way for us to go. In fact, most Americans are constantly in a hurry—and not just to get from Point A to Point B. Our country has become a nation in search of the quick fix—in more ways than one.
 Once upon a time, Americans understood the principle of deferred gratification. We put a little of each paycheck away "for a rainy day".
If we wanted a new sofa or a week at a lakeside cabin, we saved up for it, and the banks helped us out by providing special Christmas Club and Vacation Club accounts. If we lived in the right part of the country, we planted corn and beans and waited patiently for the harvest. If we wanted to be thinner, we simply ate less of our favorite foods and waited patiently for the scale to drop, a pound at a time. But today we aren't so patient. We take out loans instead of making deposits, or we use our credit card to get that furniture or vacation trip—relax now, pay later. We buy our food, like our clothing, ready-made and off the rack. And if we're in a hurry to lose weight, we try the latest miracle diet, guaranteed to take away ten pounds in ten days... unless we're rich enough to afford liposuction. Not only do we want it now; we don't even want to be kept waiting for it. This general impatience, the "I-hate-to-wait" attitude, has infected every level of our lives. Instead of standing in line at the bank, we withdraw twenty dollars in as many seconds from an automatic teller machine. Then we take our fast money to a fast convenience store(why wait in line at the supermarket?), where we buy a frozen dinner all wrapped up and ready to be put into the microwave...unless we don't care to wait even that long and pick up some fast food instead. And if our fast meal doesn't agree with us, we hurry to the medicine cabinet for—you guessed it—some fast relief. We like fast pictures, so we buy Polaroid cameras. We like fast entertainment,so we record our favorite TV show on the VCR. We like our information fast, too: messages flashed on a computer screen, documents faxed from your telephone to mine, current events in 90-second bursts on Eyewitness News, history reduced to "Bicentennial Minutes". Symbolically, the American eagle now flies for Express Mail. How dare anyone keep America waiting longer than overnight?
What's more, we don't even want all of it. Once, we lingered over every word of a classic novel or the latest best seller. Today, since faster is better, we read the condensed version or put a tape of the book into our car's tape payler to listen to on the way to work. Or we buy the Cliff's Notes, especially if we are students, so we don't have to deal with the book at all. Once, we listened to every note of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Today, we don't have the time; instead, we can enjoy 26 seconds of that famous "da-da-da-DUM" theme—and 99 other musical excerpts almost as famous—on our "Greatest Moments of the Classics" CD. After all,why waste 45 minutes listening to the whole thing when someone else has saved us the trouble of picking out the best parts? Our magazine articles come to us pre-figested in Reader's Digest. Our news briefings, thanks to USA Today, are more brief than ever. Even our personal relationships have become compressed. Instead of devoting large parts of our days to our loved ones, we replace them with someting called "quality time", which, more often than not, is no time at all. As we rush from book to music to news item to relationship, we do not realize that we are living our lives by the iceberg principle—paying attention only to the top and ignoring the 8/9 that lies just below the surface.