TODAY WE CAN'T GET LOST EVEN IF WE TRY

Doggone it, now even your dog has lost its liberty. If you define liberty as including the freedom to be anonymous, then you and I have lost it too...!

In the name of technological progress, someone from here in President Obama's own Chicago neighborhood has now created a GPS tag for your pet so you can track it down whenever and wherever you wish. You say, "Well after all, Spotty is just a dog." But wait -- we now have the very same satellite cameras, cell towers and computer banks at everyday work tracking down anything and anyone you're willing to pay for.

While you catch your breath at such startling technical accomplishments, hold it long enough to ask yourself: "ust because I can do it, should I?" At one time religious leaders like Jesus and Buddha sought the privacy of isolation. Monks and gurus fled to mountaintop retreats. Inventors and innovators closed their doors to the world. Thoreau and Gauguin escaped civilization for Walden Pond and the Islands. Hollywood's Greta Garbo famously announced: I want to be alone.

Actually so did my Uncle Benny back in the 80s when he walked out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Aunt Evelyn raised their three kids with enormous success, but recently one of them showed her how she could track down her long-errant husband. Google helped her do it, and now that the electron has re-fused their parted lives, I have to wonder whether things for all of them weren't better left alone?

Modern secular civilization has this thing about gadgets. We love them, adore them, fixate about the seemingly infinite range of powers they give us. Don't get me wrong, I adore indoor plumbing too! When, though, does this rush to progress pause long enough to weigh the merits? Not as related to our physical senses, for every gadget extends their reach wondrously; but for our human spirit, because there are times when our gadgets have become our gods. Think today's cars, cellphones, petrie dishes, Vicodin, DNA codes.

It's in our nature to probe each new frontier we meet. Frontiers exist to be crossed. The challenge is in what we do with what we find there. History offers countless examples. How man first found fire...flight....printing ...radio and TV transmission....space and galactic travel....and now GPS systems that can track any pet or person anywhere anytime on the planet.

I hear the voice-of-progress asking: And which of these marvels would you give up...? That, of course, is the wrong question. The infrequently asked question that comes to mind is: Which of these marvels are best left in the genie's lamp? Especially in our technological age of exponential genies.

Every holiday that I watch my re-united Uncle Benny and Aunt Evelyn sit in silence, I'm absolutely convinced her kids and their gadgets did them all a dazzling but disastrous disservice.