One recent day, so many people called 911 when they couldn’t
get Facebook to work that police in at least one town, Bothell, Washington,
sent out messages pleading with folks to stop calling the emergency number in
hopes of quickly getting the social network “fixed.” Both Facebook and
Instagram experienced outages in various parts of the United States on that
same day.
This is
absurd- and sadly illustrative of the state of modern man. Many people have
watched homicides, suicides, and rapes live-streamed across social media sites
such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook while, apparently, calmly and
contentedly munching popcorn and deciding whether to “like” it or not. Yet, on
the rare occasions when those sites go down, they might be panicked into
calling for emergency help. This is surpassingly bizarre- and tragic.
In the
United States, our First Amendment rights are under attack, our Second
Amendment rights are under attack, and the West in general is under simultaneous attack by Islamic
extremists on one hand and secular radicals on the other. North Korea could
potentially fling devastating nuclear weapons in any number of directions,
killing millions. Humanity is willingly putting its future in the “hands” of
artificial intelligence.
And
when are we well and truly panicked? When we are separated from our smart
phone.
If we can’t watch “our shows” when we want to,
if our internet access is down and we can’t get porn or social media on demand,
if a couple of players on our fantasy football teams get injured, that is when we now reach for the phone
to call 911.
Observing the fallen condition of
mankind today…looking at the big picture…makes me want to call 911.
I only wish our society could be “fixed”
that easily.
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