While shopping with Melissa the other day, I was very carefully steering our shopping cart past other customers along an especially crowded stretch of the store. And then, straight toward us, an employee was casually pushing an imposing-looking pallet jack. I watched him as he approached...and then he took out his cell phone and started looking at it while nonchalantly navigating his jack past without regard to anyone around...I guess it was up to us to get out of his way. People whipping out their phones...what a scourge of our times. Have you ever found yourself talking to someone, only to look over and see that they're zoned out and ignoring you, scrolling on their phone? The only thing worse I know is the increasingly frightening circumstance of people...in anger...pulling out guns without any sense of restraint in using them. It's become far too commonplace on the news to be met with the story of a shooter at a school, church, home or business...and often it's a minor who has committed the crime. In the 1995 James Bond flick Goldeneye, Agent 007's Russian female partner Natalya Simonova had a contemptuous name for this phenomenon for pervasive and often harmful obsession with gadgetry: Boys with Toys. So we're now living...or trying to stay alive...in the "Boys (and Girls) with Toys" era: whoopee...
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My husband, David, and I were just talking about the cellphone scourge the other day. We are relative late-comers to this whole smartphone thing, but we travel a lot and it's gotten too difficult to try and navigate things (especially delays and cancellations) without a phone handy. I absolutely hate it when I'm talking to someone and who keeps looking at pictures on their phones. And I find the current gun culture particularly frightening. I was in the US over Christmas a few years ago, staying out in Alachua. Late one evening I thought it would be nice if David and I rode around to look at Christmas lights. But after driving slowly along a few of the rural, residential streets I actually became worried that some frightened lunatic might come out and shoot me because they somehow felt threatened by me driving slowly past their house. What a world.
ReplyDeleteI feel similarly when I think of possibly taking an evening walk or jog around the neighborhood. It's bad enough in broad daylight when a slowly passing van seems to be stalking me as I go through my walk/run course. Pedestrians are the new victimized class. Yet gun owners tend to think of themselves as the victims. The older I get the more I feel like a stranger in this strange land.
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