There are, or so I have been led to believe, those people who awaken in the morning and are instantly awake, alert and out of bed. I don’t know who you are, but I hate you people. You are the ones who always show up for work having read the morning paper over a real breakfast, after they have run a few miles or gone to a yoga class or built a model of the White House out of matchsticks. What is it with you people, anyway? You are the ones who have created this world where us non-morning people are at a disadvantage every morning until about 10:00 and three venti Americanos.
Fortunately, I telecommute.
Anyway, the real subject of this post has to do with what was running through my mind the other morning as I lay trying to remember how many times I hit the snooze button, or wondering if that, too, was just a bad dream.
Has it ever occurred to you that the old 1969 Zager & Evans hit, In the Year 2525, may be coming true, only it won’t take nearly as long as Rick Evans thought? Technology has already made the Industrialized World a world of wimps. Most of us couldn’t survive without a microwave. We can’t find our own food (unless it’s in the freezer aisle), we definitely couldn’t kill it, we’d be naked once we ran out of clothes to steal, and a majority of us would simply die out of ignorance and helplessness. For most of us, there simply is no post-apocalyptic existence possible. We are, out of our own design, completely reliant upon technology.
I started thinking (why, I don’t know) about the kings and the wealthy of just a couple of centuries ago. Do you realize that Solomon had no indoor plumbing? Most of us wouldn’t even spend the night where we had to use a chamber pot. No daily (or even monthly) showers? No anti-bacterial soap?
Somewhere around the Enlightenment things started to change; as we grew in knowledge, we began to lose something else. The more we learned, the more we became dependent upon our own inventions. And, shockingly enough, it occurred to me what the real culprit was. It’s not television, the internet or rock music; the culprit was movable type. Our dependence upon books and information and ideas has made us “book-smart” but weak in other areas.
Am I awake yet?
It’s interesting but if all were to fail the people who would most likely be able to survive are the dumpster divers, the builders of sheet metal subdivisions, those who’ve learned to get by on a “day to day” hand to mouth level not just as it relates to physical food provision but also the mental angle of what really is a necessary for life.
Moveable type? Not TV or internet?
Then justice reigns. Nobody reads anymore.