Kevin Kelly: belief

Transcript context

…You’re from Westfield, New Jersey. How does that matter? Yes. Well, I try to convey to my kids how parochial Westfield, New Jersey, was during the ’50s and ’60s, where I graduated high school never having eaten Chinese food, never having picked up chopsticks, never being around people from other cultures. The paucity in the local bookstore of finding out information, of how things worked: it was incredibly parochial at that time. Even the cuisine, the stuff that we ate: macaroni and cheese, meatloaf. It was unbelievably hard — when I came back from Asia the first time, I decided I wanted to try to cook something Chinese, so I went to hunt for fresh ginger. I had to basically travel to Newark, New Jersey, a big city, to find an Italian grocery to find fresh ginger, which of course now is available everywhere. There was this sense of the parochial, little, circular, isolated sense of a suburb that is most strong in my mind right now. I feel as if I knew nothing and there was very little contact with things that were different or other. It was not cosmopolitan in the least. That, of course, has changed over time. But that’s the journey that I’ve been on, is leaving that behind. I used to think of Westfield as the bigger town, so imagine my upbringing.…

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