By Steffi Fillingham
When I was a kid, we didn’t have chat rooms, we didn’t have computers, we didn’t have mobile phones, we didn’t have internet.
We had hardwired home phones with long cords if we were lucky. If we weren’t lucky, the phones were attached to the wall in the middle of the kitchen and the farthest you could get away from anyone nearby was about three feet. So, you whispered plans to meet your friends later, if you were allowed out, or plans to meet at school recess the next day.
And that, my friends, is how we came to have clubs. A few seemingly like-minded kids would decide that we needed one, and thus our club was born. Someone was named to be its leader, no doubt because they were tall or had nice clothes, or didn’t. And then we’d make a list of who could join. Democracy at its best? Not a chance. But we’d disperse happily with a promise to meet up after school at somebody’s house if their parents said it was okay.
By four o’clock, there we’d be, up in somebody’s bedroom across the hall from the family bathroom, or down in the basement’s panelled rec room, mere feet away from the laundry machines and Dad’s punching bag – a feature of his long-promised plan to get fit.
The meeting would come to order and start with things we had in common… a favorite song, cherry coke and French fries, our cool history teacher. Soon, though, the day’s business would devolve into whisperings of what we thought of schoolmates and other people we supposedly didn’t like or approve of and thus who we wouldn’t let into our club. More likely than not, though, the people we were talking about weren’t in our club because they thought we were dorks and wouldn’t have anything to do with us.
Since no one was willing to admit that, or perhaps we just didn’t have a clue, we’d move on to the rest of our pressing agenda. Who did what to whom? Who’s to blame? What was the issue? Was anyone going to the school’s Fall Fair? Did anyone know how to do the Mashed Potatoes? What was a fair allowance? Did anyone’s parents care what we thought about that? You know. Important stuff.
After about forty-five minutes we’d be pretty much done, probably bored, and hungry for an after school snack which only our mothers (again if we were lucky) knew how to provide.
Tomorrow was another day with new challenges, issues and somebody else’s rec room to tackle them in. We were a team, we belonged. And that felt good. So home we’d go.
At home with our parents, sometimes there were old Mickey Rooney movies to be watched on TV. Anybody remember the one with the famous line “My Uncle has a barn! Let’s put on a show!!!” Ah, those were the days.
Fast forward to modern times and the Gang that keeps on giving.
Welcome to Signal-Gate and all its Signal-puppies.
By now we’ve had all the supposedly cool teenagers caught red handed on a Secret Club phone chat about bombing the bad guys in Yemen. Oh, and guess what? Many of them had brought the brand new audio/video walkie talkies they got for Christmas. No hackers necessary, since their secret code of identifying themselves with first and last initials led them all to miss an extra set of initials on the chat. Those extra ones just happened to belong to the Editor of the school newspaper. In its next edition he spilled the beans on how the Secret Club wasn’t very good at keeping secrets after all.
Then the cool teenagers retaliated by claiming the editor was on the chat because he is a fake media bad guy. Their back-up story involved how his phone number had somehow been sucked into a cool teenager contact list and he was now trying to be cool too by telling fibs.
So the next edition included the contents of the chat, right down to a sophomoric explosion schedule.
Thus came the “No, I didn’t steal the Hallowe’en candy (read: “I didn’t put him on the call/I didn’t know he was on the call,”) blame game, with more fingers pointing in different directions that we can care to count.
That was followed closely by the “Well, there really wasn’t any Hallowe’en candy in the jar anyway.”
The leader of the club claimed not to know much about it, then revised that story to say it probably wasn’t a very good thing and that it might have been a better idea if all those teenagers had been together down in one of their cozy rec rooms if they needed to talk about blowing stuff up.
Most of the cool teenagers have gone home now to watch Mickey Rooney movies. A couple of them are still allowed out, though, like the one who keeps showing up at private meetings with members of his family. Maybe they carry the egg salad sandwiches – a luxury in these times.
Anyway, either times have changed, or they haven’t. My Uncle has a White House! Let’s put on a show! I’m just saying….