So my wife, Laurel, and I were sitting next to each other at the kitchen table in our old rural home in southwestern Maine recently – and I sent her an email. Given my failing ninety-year old brain, I tell her what’s on my mind right away, often online, lest I forget.
But could this idiosyncratic behavior could be a symptom of a larger societal malaise? I am by no means the first one to ask this question, but I still think that it’s worth asking: what has today’s computer technology been doing to our humanity? Can’t I just talk to my wife who’s sitting right next to me? Are we confronting here an existential reductio ad absurdum?
Which brings to mind a vivid memory of a time not too long ago when Laurel and I were standing at the corner of 42nd Street and Madison Avenue in New York City, observing the tightly packed crowd of pedestrians stirring all around us. Was everyone, except us two, on their phones? Yes. Or so it appeared, even when all started swarming across the street after the light had changed. Yikes! Everyone was crossing that hectic main thoroughfare in one of the largest cities in the world with their noses, as it were, pressed to their screens. A vast river of cellphones appeared to be flowing to who knows where! What, if anything, was everyone trying to say at that moment? What messages were they receiving out there in the middle of that great flow of humanity?
I remember early on in my own vocational history, when I was considering writing my first book. A dear friend observed to me: “you know, you ought to have something to say.” Which leads me to this perhaps ancient wise-saying, which I have just made up: “Sometimes saying nothing is the best thing to say.” ‘Tis true, I believe, even though you have a device in your hand that allows you to say anything, anywhere, at any time. My thought here is perhaps best expressed by that railroad crossing sign which was once familiar to many in my generation: Stop, Look, and Listen. Translated for our world today: stick your phone into your pocket or your purse ASAP; or even, horrors, leave it at home.
Which might be just the injunction the pedestrian crowds of our world most urgently need to hear this season, me included. Sheathe your phones, children. Then see the Christ Child in the manger. There, in the words of the old hymn, the silent Word is pleading.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.