Introduction to RLOs

In my spare time (which right now isn't lacking) I've been working on some personal math projects, stuff I like to call Relative Metrics. It is pretty wide ranging and easily understood, in general, and I'm going to highlight a small portion on this blog site. This post will act as a brief nearly unrelated background for the small portion I'm calling RLO, or in plural, RLOs, an acronym standing for Relative Life Occurrence(s).

One afternoon I was at Hudson's, a bar-and-grill I worked at in San Luis Obispo, when I heard in a conversation (from other workers) that the "Civil War was so long ago, it shouldn't even matter anymore." Well, I took exception to this. To someone nineteen, without a sense of history or time or true idea of the immense slowness of national progress, to someone too young to remember elementary school without computers, I guessed it could make sense that 150 years is too long ago to have any relative affect on everyday life today. To people my age (25-35), our parents grew up in a world with only three TV channels, and their parents, our grandparents, didn't have television at all. Our grandparents' grandparents could've, if they were in the States at the time, participated in the Civil War. 

I mention television above plenty because, to me, it is a good marker for people younger than me to see as a turning point, a point from where time and technological progress seem to advance quickly, leaving past generations behind.

Television (the new thing) vs the Civil War (the old thing). Never shall the twain meet?

Well, as I've said I don't have TV, but I do have a television box, and a DVD player, so I'm not without the dreaming appliance with the loud and colorful dreams. My mom got for me a collection of Ed Murrow DVDs, documentaries and remastered shows, after we talked about how good the film "Good Night, and Good Luck" was. 

On this Ed Murrow collection is a television interview he did with Grandma Moses, and elder from upstate New York, a painter and muralist, some of whose murals are still up on buildings in the cute upstate villages. She was pushing 90 years in age, was eloquent, smart, funny, opinionated, was happy the way her life had been, and not afraid of dying. She had kids, more grandkids, and lots of great-grandkids.

Ed asked her about her earliest memories, and she told him about returning to the village in which they lived, from a walking trip, when she noticed black bunting along the rails of most everybody's veranda's and porches. She tugged on someone's coat, asking what the bunting meant, and was told that the President had just been killed. Some of her earliest memories were from hearing about President Lincoln's assassination. She was on TV, talking about this. 

She most likely wasn't the oldest living American at this time, but could've been the oldest to appear on television, as a "celebrity" of sorts. But my point remains; someone with memories of Lincoln's shooting has been on television.

Now, my discussion of this topic, this connection, isn't exactly the direction of my studies into Relative Life Occurrences, but I'm using it to illustrate my assertion that 150 years ago does have an affect on today's American culture and outlook, an assertion with which most (if not all) historians would agree. My studies into RLOs has more to do with trying to define what would be an agreeable way to decide how much influence the near past, the slightly farther past, and the far past, has over this era.