Ever go to bed at night feeling lonely? Wake up still feeling lonely? Even with all its incessant sights and sounds, it can be a powerfully lonely world. Artists, composers and poets are forever reminding us. And yet....
Each of us is actually an object of incessant attentions. Think about it for a lonely moment. Wherever you go these days there's a camera looking at you, a camera on the other end of which are eyes that are monitoring you. Other eyes even without cameras are monitoring you. At the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, the banks you use, the stores you shop, the schools you attend, and the companies whose credit cards you hold.
You may feel lonely, but you are far from being alone.
Now there are folks who take exception to this. Libertarians, Tea Partiers, survivalists, teenagers, constitutional atheists, and assorted free spirits. They resent any authority outside their own psyche. And so it is they resist taxes, body scans, seat belts, nativity scenes, parents, and now any federal regulation of their health. Their mantra is: Better dead free, than being alive slave!
The passions and politics therein are too complicated for any short commentary. However, the short and long of it is simply this: Nobody outside the Siberian hillsides has been truly alone since the telegraph.TIME MAGAZINE made a good choice in selecting the founder of Facebook as their person-of-the-year. His dazzlingly comprehensive network has now pretty much completed Mission Impossible -- no one ever need (or try to be) alone again.
There's a postscript. Even without the communication technologies, people have always been in sustaining communication with you and me. It's all those fleeting moments in our fleeting lives when for a sweet fleet moment someone in the world is thinking about us. A parent, a child, a sibling, a friend, a teacher, a clergy, a co-worker, a lover, a hater, whoever's lives we have once upon a time touched.
See...? There's really never been any reason to feel alone in this life. Feeling lonely is another essay.
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I think you confuse people who ask questions and ask for explanations rather than blindly following BAD authority, with people who resist authority.
ReplyDeleteIf someone is asking for a good reason for something and you don't have a good answer, you have to ask _yourself_ why. Maybe there isn't a good reason.
This non theist thinks we need higher taxes, more cameras, already enjoys universal health care, wishes more people would wear seat belts, is not bothered by nativity scenes and welcomes being questioned by her teenagers. Libertarian's and Tea Partiers believe the are following God's authority. I question that claim.
As for social networks, I think they are the best thing invented for men. Now men have access to the same social networks women have always enjoyed.