walden lost
Here’s a newsflash: most of us are addicts now. To our TV’s, to our cellphones, to our computer, to social networks, to everything Digital. If the medium is the message, here’s the message — we got a syringe in our heads with a permanent IV drip.
My mom used to catch us kids laying around, doing pretty much nothing, complaining how we were bored. Nothing to do, we’d whine. She wasn’t buying it, no way, no sir. She’d shoo our sorry butts off the couch and out the door, where, presumably, the world was waiting for us to get busy, make something of a new day, summon up the neighborhood cronies, go bike riding or play whiffleball.
Watch a friend who’s visiting and notice how frequently they check their phone for a text message. These are people OUR age. The kids never stop checking. It’s like having video games and Netflix and the high school prom and phone gossip and Google all wrapped up in a candy wrapper. The heroin isn’t listed as an ingredient but believe me, it’s there. We’ve hooked the kids, we’ve hooked ourselves. Our attention spans are shorter than a commercial now. And everything in America is a commercial. Don’t ask me what the answer is. There’s no methadone for this, no 12 step program, no Going Back. Every 30 seconds we need a Google fix, a text message, a Facebook update, a digital affirmation that we’re still on-line, still worthy, still connected.
Walden Pond now isn’t some remote back-to-the-land escape from the oppression of the Industrial Age, it’s a wilderness where cellphone towers are spotty and cable doesn’t reach and high-speed internet isn’t available. It’s a place where Hi-Fi exists, but Wi-Fi doesn’t. It’s a primitive world where the pace of life is measured, not in Twitters, but in the entire day, in the seasons, in lives moving slowly with time to pause and contemplate. It’s a world that, sadly, no longer exists. Not even down here on the halcyon South End. You don’t believe me, Google it…..
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