Indifference to Strangers: Coincidence? No It's Not.

Michael Z.
United States History Period A
Posting #4
Author: Eli Davidson

"Growing up on a gravel road in Bucyrus, Kan., a car... any car... and especially a car we didn't know was a big deal. We'd run out to the road and wave at the adult behind the wheel as the dust clouds of the speeding car settled. Strangers were a rare fruit. We never took them for granted." This is but a memory for author Eli Davidson. And sadly, we are becoming more and more removed from the strangers and people around us.            Eli Davidson comes to grips with this cold reality at an airport, when she is taking her shoes off for a security checkpoint and runs into a disabled man who was reaching in vain to untie a double-knot on his shoes. After she helps him undo the knots and reties his shoes, the man thanks her, to which she says "no biggie". The man replies " "Thank you. In 35 years of traveling no one has ever done that for me."
  The occasional contact between us and strangers in the airport is just one of millions of moments where we come out of our minds and are aware of the world and its people around us. Now as the technology is improving, slowly going out of control, scientists are telling us that it is getting worse. Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.
  Closer to home, when a sixteen year old boy who relied on texting for almost everything when asked what he wanted to do almost said wistfully that "Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation." Certainly frightening in its implications of our future, what would happen if we did one day forget how to communicate face-to-face?
  How often have we each been so embroiled in our own petty dramas that we breeze past someone in trouble? My hand is raised. How about yours? How often have we each walk past a person that needs help? I believe that we have not advanced as a society as a result of technology, but we are slowly going back in time, to an era that we would not be able to talk, to communicate vocally as a result of social networking on the Internet. We would slowly turn away from the concept of family, of friendship, of teamwork and partnership; we would forgo the need for school and become so encased in our own self-importance that we ignore everyone else. I hope that this does not happen, but it is the direction in which we are headed.