The Slow Vanishing of the Old World
– not unlike –
***
A Birthday Story for Arlen
If Rip Van Winkle woke up today, I wonder if he would recognize anything at all.
He would step out of the woods expecting the world he knew—the familiar faces, the slow and steady rhythm of life, the sense that things made sense. Instead, he would find himself standing in the middle of a place that bore little resemblance to the home he left. The buildings might still be there, the roads leading to the same town square, but the same folk he knew, older now, were moving at a faster pace. An invisible force was shaping their lives, propelling them forward.
I know this because I felt it myself.
When I returned home from the Army, not only had my friends changed, but my entire orientation toward life had altered so profoundly that I hardly recognized the town I grew up in. The change was that dramatic. The houses were the same, the old stores still sold the same candy bars I used to buy for a few empty soda bottles collected along the LIRR tracks. Bill, behind the counter, was older, but my friends and the customs of life they were now living were unrecognizable.
The old world that Rip once knew—the world I had left in 1965—had been built on a balance between commerce and governance, work and reward, individual freedom and communal responsibility. Yes, Walt Disney had faded into the background with the killing of President Kennedy and the rise of Black Power, but something else, something beyond the disruption of order and balance, was shifting.
Something was moving, and the pace of life was accelerating. At first, the change was subtle, barely noticeable. But over time, it became undeniable. The people who had stayed in my town did not seem to notice—perhaps because they were too busy keeping up. Just as Rip could never quite grasp what had happened to his town, people today struggle to comprehend how much has changed because they are too busy living inside the momentum of that change.
There was a time when democracy functioned at the speed of a printing press, when ideas spread through conversation, through pamphlets, through speeches delivered in town squares. Now, decisions are made in milliseconds, shaped by algorithms, dictated by forces so vast and complex that no single individual can grasp their full implications. It is not that democracy has been taken away, but that it no longer operates within the same frame of time. The world moves faster than the mechanisms that once made civic participation meaningful.
There was no great moment when everything changed. No single event, no single law, no defining shift that one could point to and say, That was it. That was when democracy gave way to something else. Instead, it was a series of small, almost imperceptible changes, each one justified by progress, efficiency, or necessity.
As the world moves faster, it becomes harder to see what is being lost. Rip returned to a town where people no longer recognized him. The world had changed, and those who could not keep up were left behind. Today, the same thing is happening—not just to individuals, but to entire generations, entire ways of thinking, entire belief systems struggling to remain relevant. The slow, reflective way of life—the kind where people had time to think, to question, to deliberate—has been swallowed up by the need to move forward, to act, to adapt.
This is not a dystopia. There was no single villain, no grand conspiracy. The world changed because, in time, it was in its nature to do so. But the people steering it—the billionaires, the political figures, the corporate architects of modern life—are not enlightened beings. World leaders are not philosopher-kings and queens. They are flawed, as vulnerable to power, fear, deception, stupidity, and self-preservation as anyone else. And the higher they rise, the more they must protect themselves—not just from outside threats, but from the very consequences of their own unenlightened actions.
Rip Van Winkle woke up to find himself in a world where the past had been quietly erased, and no one even noticed.
I woke up to find myself in a world where democracy, freedom, and individual control still existed in name, but had been redefined in ways few truly understood.
Most people, however, are still asleep.
If Rip Van Winkle had woken up a century earlier, he might have found a world that had changed, but one where the core rhythms of life remained intact. He could have adjusted. He could have learned the new customs, rejoined the social order, and lived out his days.
But today, time itself has changed.
The problem is not just that the world is different. It is that the rate of change is now so extreme that the very ground beneath our feet never stops shifting. We are not just living in a transformed world; we are living inside transformation itself spirially down a path to unknown consquences.
People still believe in the old stories—of democracy, of opportunity, of progress, and even the enemies they were taught to fear—because, deep down, they need to. To admit that the world they inhabit is not the one they were promised would be too unsettling.
So they carry on, holding onto the belief that they must maintain a sense of control.
But the horse has long since left the barn.
And we are still standing in the stalls, wondering where it has gone.
Edward