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Out with the new....
Oscar van Loveren
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Bethlehem
Jan 10, 2003
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"When the honeymoon is over." At face value an innocent cliche, but really a phrase that captures the essence of much of our modern day "consume and dispose" society. We accept the fact that a relationship is a year of lust and then a grind until you hit the road again, that hit songs wear off after fifty spins, and that a new place to live "gets old" after a while. Disposability, not just in a material sense.
As a product of my time I was once again packing up and moving, this time to Bethlehem. The smoke from the mill had long cleared, in fact it was just about the time Dave Frye was leaving. What I found was a beautiful city where culture and values are not forgotten, where arts and music matter, and where preservation of history, material as well as otherwise, is important. A city founded by people who cared not just about acreage and power, and a city dutifully maintained, expanded and nourished thanks to one of the great companies in the history of this country. Values and the money to do the job right: The Moravians and The Steel, not as odd a combination as might seem. Together they built educational institutions, a (now) historic downtown with great aesthetic appeal, and a lasting appreciation for the finer things in life. More importantly, though, I found people that realized and enjoyed this, no matter where they came from.
I was born and spent two decades in the old country, on the tail end of the era of frugality, just in time to enter the "more is better period". As a properly socially disconnected young man growing up in Europe and the USA in the seventies and eighties, I quit work, broke up, and moved more times than I can rememberÃÂÂÂÂÃÃÂÃÂÂ
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