In Robert Asprin’s “Incarnations of Immortality” series, the personification of Famine sits in a fast food restaurant with a smile on his face talking to one of the other incarnations. As he sits there, he says that the fast food industry is one of his favorites. He points out how fat the people are and how much they eat, but the best part, he says, is that they don’t even know that they are starving. The people are feasting on what is perceived to be abundance when in fact it does not contain the nutrients to sustain life. They are undernourished despite the fact that they are obese. That scene has duplicated itself in real life in several areas. We have created what appears to be an abundance of not only food but also of choice, information and social interaction. Walking into a grocery store, a person could be paralyzed by the number of choices available, but upon closer inspection, the choice is really between products that contain the same ingredients – corn, often in the form of corn syrup and soy in the form of soy oil. Delving deep into the matter, we know that choice is limited by the amount of money available to the chooser. In food, this means that many of the healthiest foods are not available to the people who need it most – the working poor. Money also decides where we are going to live, what we are going to drive and what type of health care we are going to have. We are rich when it comes to the appearance of choice, but the reality of choices does not live up to the appearances. We have so much information at our fingertips that this has been dubbed the information age. In fact, anyone can create information at any time and place it on the web for everyone else to find. There is so much information and misinformation available that it is hard to sift through what is true and what is made up. We drowned in information, and it is hard to find out what is the truth and who is reliable, especially when “news” channels misadvertise themselves as “fair and balanced.” Even when we are able to find a reliable source, it often gets disrupted by distractions that include cute cat videos and hits to the groin. With social media and texting blowing up, we should be entering the connection age. Unfortunately, it is the social media and the texting that ends up separating us. Visiting someone’s Facebook page is not visiting them. Texting someone is not talking to them. Human beings need to have interaction not interfacing. Without the face-to-face communication and the touch that often accompanies such visits, people become depressed and distant. While social media appears to increase social interaction, it generally decreases the social interaction that really matters. Intimacy goes down while self-disclosure goes up. When abundance is really scarcity, it is hard to see. We need to be aware of those situations that would deprive us of the things that we need. | |
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