Benefit of Technology

People are no longer comfortable around people.  We can text and internet chat for hours--sometimes even with random people-- but we can’t answer a phone without knowing who it is first.  We can type comment after comment on a facebook or blog post, but we can’t hold a conversation that requires eye contact for more than a few moments.  We can let our children spend hours online, but we won’t let them out of our sight on our own block.  Through our great advancements in technology, we’ve actually made ourselves afraid of the people near us.  We are more comfortable talking to a person we will never meet rather than our neighbors.  With all of our means of connectivity, we are more disconnected from humanity than ever.  We spend more effort following the trial of a mother in Florida than we spend knowing what’s going on in our own community, then we all perceive to be experts on that trial, yet still have no input as to situations we can actually affect.  To digress for a moment, I have news for all who think they know the real outcome:  if a jury can reach a unanimous verdict of not guilty, the case was weak; the prosecution made the mistake of hoping the jury would neglect their duty and convict on emotion and not evidence, of which there apparently was not enough.  As a father of five, I want justice for the little girl, and I believe that in the end, fate or karma or whatever you want to call it will have things as they should be, even though less than a week has passed and people have moved on.  Back to the point: People know more about things that do not affect them than they do about what goes on directly around them; we are more in touch with the happenings in far away places than in our own towns.  And as a result, we are afraid of everything because of a few examples we see or hear about.

I remember going to my Grandma’s house, getting my Grandpa’s old, broken BB rifle, meeting a neighbor boy in the storm sewer that ran behind her house and pretending we were any number of things, as long as we got to travel the whole area.  Playing with a gun, playing out of sight, playing in places that could potentially be dangerous (I’m pretty sure the teens in the neighborhood used the area as a drinking spot with all the broken beer bottles we’d find), none of those things could happen today.  “Be home before dark” used to be the rule, unless of course we were playing a game that required the dark; now the rule is “stay where  I can see you.”  I mean, we now designate times for trick-or-treating, during the daylight, which kinda defeats the purpose a bit.  I’m not saying it’s not safer, but I was never injured nor accosted at night going all over the neighborhoods, well out of sight of my own home.  Some say the world has gone mad, but I think really it is us that have gone mad.  The more we know about the world, the less comfortable we feel in it, but the world has always been a bit “mad;” it’s just we didn’t have access to all the potential threats.  We’re more connected to the world, yet disconnected from reality at the same time.  And while I do enjoy knowledge and technology, I wish I could go back to a time when I wasn’t suspicious of the ice cream truck driver.