Being in the old guy category makes me pause when I have a negative thought about changes happening around me that for whatever reason I do not participate. I often wonder it is a function of age or do I really think it is destroying the thinking mind .
A world dominated by 140 character messages (Twitter) and 6 second videos (Vine) when does a person that uses these sources have to time to think of a problem they raise. If your a reporter you are told to limit your pieces to 300 words or less, not much of a story can be put together with that few words.
The physical world around me is filled with folk who have head down fingers furiously tapping out 140 characters (to say exactly what I am not sure) but they spend most of their waking day tapping away. (I wonder sometimes if they do it when they are asleep) . If their not typing they have their phone active letting me in on conversations I don't want to here and it clearly must be important because they do it while driving.
Out of all this I think we are shaping a world , that when we are successful will not want to live in. TV is a wasteland of reality shows where the goal seems to be to destroy your opponent. God help the viewer if a show becomes popular , because you will soon be swamped by 20 more just like it. Everything from snake handling religions, to Cajun alligator hunters, all of which are interesting not more than a couple of times. The ultimate end game is of course a show where a man and a woman unknown to each other are thrown into a nasty piece of ground , bare ass naked , with few supplies and are supposed to survive a week. From there it's a small leap to Dooms Dayers who are planning to survive the worst case scenario , all well and good, but they seldom point out that someone always has more and better weapons and if you have food they will attempt to get it.
Mean time in the real world , we have a government that is not functional. A world where your eyes show you we are in the midst of a giant shift in weather patterns , financially a world just waiting to go into another great depression, a country where half the population is not making a living wage, jobs that are gone and might never come back, while the rich are getting richer.
Now there is nothing wrong with being rich , but when the only way you can get richer is to make other people poorer can only end up a catastrophe. So it is time for each one of us to stop tweeting and cell phoning and to start thinking about fixing the mess we are in.
A Facebook friend just posted the story about the frenzy at a WalMart that happened when the Food Stamp EBT card computer went down and there were no limits on the cards for two hours. Naturally, people loaded up their carts, because they're on Food Stamps which means they're essentially starving to death. But to my friend this is outrageous criminal behavior caused by the food stamp program, which should be abolished. I waste a lot of time gabbing with such knuckleheads.
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