SAVING JAPAN, AT LEAST THE LANGUAGE

The disaster in Japan. One more brutalizing reminder to this bickering little crowd we call humanity to start realizing how fragile and interdependent we really are. And yet, humanity has been punched in the mouth with such reminders before. Like, do you remember the Black Plague in the 14th C? the influenza pandemic in the 20th C? Katrina in the 21st C? Sure you do, but has very much changed about our species since then?

Not so that anyone could seriously notice. In exact sequence, we are stunned, horrified, slowed, and then on to whatever's next. Hardwired to shut down our pain receptors in order to keep surviving.

Still, we can no longer deny our interdependence. Watching the tides rise in California from the tsunami in Japan says it all. And so does the Internet on which almost all 6 billion of us are now digitally inter-woven. Including even the reluctant Luddites who delude themselves they are not caught up in it simply because "I don't use it."

The Internet is virtually Biblical. If the classic definition of God is being everywhere at every moment...well, you see where I'm going. Still, the Internet's critics have latched onto a particular linguistic attack. The Internet's quickie messages and truncated lexicons are killing our languages. All this Facebook and Twitter shorthand is enough to give every literature professor this side of Lybia cardiac arrest. Also assuring the reading public there will never likely be another Shakespeare, Emerson, Whitman, Steinbeck or Tennessee Williams again.

Even with a snarl or two about where today's Silcon Valley wunderkinds are Pied Pipering us, personal experiences say otherwise. Even granting the insipid hyphenated words and denuded beauties to our language, two facts are hard to ignore >>

First, many of us on Facebook and Twitter are now in tender touch with hundreds, maybe thousands, of friends and family long lost; plus new friends and comrades recently discovered. Consider this -- in lieu of idle chatter over dinners about golf scores, pension cheats and Charlie Sheen, the Internet lets us tap into distant minds and hearts still actually fascinated with the art and science of conversation and investigation...!

Second, thousands of Internet websites offer the full texts of entire speeches vs cable-pundit-soundbites; direct video encounters with important authors and scholars vs skewed second-hand reviews; a multiplicity of in-depth dialogs among the kind of keen minds we last heard in our last advanced college courses....!

From Japan to California to wherever we live -- we're connected. And wisely used, the Net can make that connection almost Biblical.