Among the joys of newspapers is that what is most interesting about them is often not what is most important.
Or at least not what the editors judge is most important, as indicated by what they choose to put on the front page. It`s the stuff on the back pages that holds more clues to the way we live now. And just as often, the treasure is contained not at the beginning (the lede, as it`s known in the biz; no, we can`t spell, either) but somewhere in the 12th paragraph.
Take, for instance, an item that ran recently about home buyers unhappy because new rules imposed by the Federal Housing Administration will raise the price of buying a home. Their complaints may be justified. People who buy houses with the help of FHA mortages are not rich, and forcing them to pay more is akin to raising taxes on the not-so-well-to-do, a common practice of late but still unwise.
What was really fascinating, though, was the comment by one prospective home buyer, explaining why the higher price would be so hard for him.
”I`ve got to spend $1,500 for landscaping and a fence,” said the 27-year-old warehouse worker, otherwise unidentified, ”and I need a garage opener.”
Hold on just a second here. The fence may be necessary to keep small children in the yard. Landscaping, in some subdivisions, is required. But a garage opener? For a 27-year-old man?
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Yes, life is tough without one. You have to get out of the car, open the door, get back in the car, drive into the garage, get out again and close the garage door. What travail! Still, it was not long ago that the average 27-year-old, or for that matter 57-year-old, just assumed that it was one of life`s little burdens and that there were better uses for $150 or so than buying a gizmo to open and close the door automatically.
But the distinction between necessity and luxury is ever in flux. A generation ago, people who had central air-conditioning thought themselves on Easy Street. Today, those same people can`t live without it.
But it is not just a matter of creature comforts. Institutions, too, which seem frivolous under some circumstances can appear to be sensible if not required in others.
To find examples, we need only turn to two other recent news stories that appeared far from the front page. One concerned a study sponsored by the National Sleep Foundation. The other concerned a study that was commented on by the director of the Fatherhood Project of the Families and Work Institute. Whereupon are two questions raised: Does the nation need its very own Sleep Foundation? And does anybody need a Fatherhood Project, much less a Families and Work Institute?
The answers are: probably yes and probably no. But the very existence of the organizations, necessary or not, tells us something about ourselves. For instance, one of the problems with which the Sleep Foundation deals, according to its executive director, is snoring, which for most of human history has been either a joke or an annoyance or both, but hardly anything that required clinical treatment.
”People used to make fun of people who snored,” said Carol Westbrook, who pointed out that some snorers suffer from ”sleep apnea,” in which people ”cannot breathe and sleep at the same time.” There are now ways of treating this ailment, she said, obtainable from one of the roughly 2,000 physicians who specialize in sleep disorders, many of them working out of one of the 150 or so ”sleep disorder centers” in the country.
It should come as no surprise that what was once ”snoring” is now
”sleep apnea.” After all, what was once ”lumbago” or ”the rheumatiz”
is now a herniated disk, treatable if not exactly curable. And what was once bringing up the kids is now ”parenting,” which is neither treatable nor curable, but is one of the subjects studied by the Families and Work Institute and its Fatherhood Project, which gathers and disseminates information
”examining the future of fatherhood and ways to support men`s involvement in childrearing.” Well, it couldn`t hurt.
Surely it is better to sleep through the night than to snore yourself awake or to suffer, without hope, from insomnia. And possibly it is better to get information about the problems of raising kids, even in sociologese, than to worry in ignorance whether you`re going about it all wrong.
But someone should point out how all of this ought to remind us how lucky we are. Only a relatively successful society, however uneven and imperfect its success, can afford to devote resources to solving problems that not long ago weren`t even recognized as problems but were simply considered the way things were.
Now young men demand garage door openers. And they may be wise. Open and close those garage doors for years, and you could come down with a bad case of the rheumatiz.