The Cassette Player That Exemplifies What America Is All About

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Sony Walkman. As I was contemplating the 233rd anniversary of the birth of this nation, I began to realize that I am getting old and that I have first hand memories of a fair amount of this nations history. Twenty percent to be exact. If you add to that the first hand memories that have been conveyed to me by people that I have known personally, the percentage rises to near 50%. That's actually quite surprising. Not so much because of my age but because of the relatively young age of this country.

So what does that have to do with the Sony Walkman? It's a product introduced in 1979. The running theme I want to talk about is change. Not Obama change, but real change. Change that is progress. Real progress that is for the good of this nation as well as all nations.

Let's start with the fact that the Walkman was a product from Japan. A mere forty years before the product was released, the Rape of Nanking was a gut wrenching recent memory to thousands of Chinese women, those that survived. In 1979, that same evil empire had been long vanquished by the Allied forces of WWII. From that vanquished country came a new country. Same people, but new country. These people adopted this change, albeit by force. They prospered handsomely and started to sell products to the vanquishers. Products that made their lives easier, more affordable, and allowed them to enjoy their leisure time.

Now let's look at what has happened since the Walkman. This now seemingly clunky device has been replaced by iPods and iShuffles and an array of other MP3 players.  Nearly postage stamp size devices that can hold thousands times more music than the original cassettes that the Walkman played. Progress mostly innovated by the vanquishers and perfected by manufacturing efficiencies of the vanquished and still free neighbors of the vanquished (e.g. Taiwan). That's real change, real progress. Life changing to millions. Oh, and by the way, they're neat little gizmos. An anecdote to this that illustrates the rapid advance of technology is this story of a 13-year-old that is asked to review the Sony Walkman on its 30th anniversary. The kid didn't know that a cassette had two sides to it.

Happy Birthday America! Birth place of change, real change.