When it comes to keeping abreast of the latest technology I am, perhaps, more primitive than a pilgrim.
The progress of which has galloped far beyond the scope of my imagination and definite capabilities.
With a likeness to waves receding from a high-tide shore, I feel like a flipped-over star fish. Lucky for me, my teenage grandson, Alex, helps me out whenever a simple computer problem confronts me.
But is not knowing, at my age, such a terrible thing? I think not. A day or so back, on a quick trip to pick up some groceries the person behind the wheel in the car ahead of us at the stoplight was texting. At the parking lot a driver, while trying to park had a phone clamped to his ear.
The rest bench, just inside the door, crowded within were three teenager’s butts, each gazing, blank faced, into their hand held gizmos. Between the rows as I wandered, several, both he and she, could be heard exchanging verbal grocery lists on their cordless, some from just the next aisle over.
Has the day not arrived? Is Einstein’s long ago prediction not correct? And I quote: “I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots.”
And does not the words uncovered in the late 1960s, within the lost notes of the naturalist Loren Eiseley, defined by himself as a bone hunter, confirm the grasp of our World Wide Web? In part I quote: “We have seen at last the meaning of the living screen… that tenuous, unsubstantial net that covers the continents and the seas of the earth like a thin film but is at the same time as powerful as the strangling grip of tropical vines upon great trees.”
As our technology grows, invading every ecological niche as it has with selective breeding and factory farming of our domestic animals, its hold becomes more and more unbreakable.
Though crowning, as we do, the top of the food chain, is this human prerogative or could it be that we have selected, by choice, by chance or by folly, the wrong branch at the fork in the rural route road.
Is this the right and only path down which we doggedly trundle or should we be thinking perhaps that there is yet another?
The animals being raised under such crowded, seemingly uncaring, conditions are all vegetarian by nature. Is there not an overlooked rent in the field of agricultural-oriented technology that could lead to the bypass of this cruelty? Protein is protein, are there not technological wanderings that could present it in edible pleasantries on our tables, avoiding completely the necessity of passing it through the gurgling, belching gas passing guts of cramped and caged animals?
I have lived sufficient years to have walked miles in the straight furrows of a single plough drawn by a matched team of quick stepping dappled percherons.
I have witnessed mixed farming assemblage switch to massive factory farms. I have watched small field crop rotation convert to square miles of genetically-altered, highly chemically fertilized, insecticide-sprayed mono cropping.
I have lived a life through the coming of age of the typewriter, before which everything under the sun was written by one hand.
In short, I have lived a life fulfilled and interesting. And I have faith in my God that the world will not end hither to my passing, nevertheless my mind is awash with fear for both the health and sanity of humanity.
Take care, ‘cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105