It's a beautiful world

Oy! This electronic, power sucking, and wonderfully convenient world in which we live is really getting me down. Not in the way the government has always gotten to me -- that's a totally different quality of down. This down is not so much frustration, but rather fatigue.

At my new job, I work with a number of kids. These kids, like most anyone who'd entered puberty in the 1990's, really only know a world of convenience. Everything from cell phones, Blackberries, Visa &/or MasterCard debit & credit cards, CD & mp3 players to workstations at home & laptops slung over their shoulders.

Sure, we could say kids today are far more spoiled than kids of my generation, or earlier. They can't put the cell phone away for a minute. I'd even seen an entirely too entertaining science program on PBS last night concerning something called the World Wide Mind, or WWM, pronounced "Wim". The WWM requires a computer chip, containing a transceiver, to be embedded into one's brain that one can be connected to anyone else with this chip embedded, & to the Internet, creating a new network, & providing one with immediate knowledge of anything they wish to know just by thinking about it.

When the WWM begins, it's pretty clear that the young will be the first to opt for it.

Let's forgo the obvious evils & ensuing abuses of this WWM & get back to my fatigue. This has been growing for quite a long time. While I love the fact that banks instituted ATM's & ATM cards, as trying to get some cash on a weekend or at night had become impossible without them. But do we really need to be able to spend, spend, spend at any moment? And why would we need to hear music everywhere we go?

OK. So, I'm a 'puter geek. Have been from the minute I'd accidentally hacked into a UNIX mainframe & found a directory containing obvious games when I was about ten years old. But I'm growing really sick of the ubiquity of computers. I think I'm mostly bothered by such companies as MicroSoft touting some new product as being the greatest thing with which we can't live without which is nothing more than a prettier piece of crap than the last one they'd released.

I doubt I'll ever find a woman who can stand me long enough to actually consider birthing my demon spawn, but should that ever happen, I think my kids might hate me. It's not that I'd be an overly strict parent, or would be stingy, or uninvolved. My kids would hate me because I would only allow them so much television & computer time. Instead, my kids would have books on most any subject available to them, they'd have board & card games, & they'd have musical instruments & other tools of destruction...or, rather, art.

I also believe that my kids would have far more encouragement in artistic, true intellectual endevours, & political activism to the point they'd likely tell me to get the hell away. And I would, as I had the children of an ex-girlfriend, explain why certain things are just not acceptable, rather than yelling & spanking when they do wrong.

But, above all else, while my kids wouldn't be deprived, they would not be spoiled.