Entry #2: Of Truth, Technology, and a Forgotten Mother

Has it come to this, that human beings have become captive eyeballs in a make-believe battlefield where there must be winners and losers?

“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes.”

- Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

I grew up in what was then the Pennsylvania countryside, in a white-tiled, red-shuttered farmhouse set on six acres with a horse barn and pasture out back. Behind the pasture lay open woods and fields that went on for as far as the wandering eye could see. Our road, which went by the lyrical name of Trewigtown, was made of gravel and barely wide enough for two cars to pass. We listed Colmar as our address, although the “town” was but a post office and a shadowy inn that served as the local watering hole.

For me and my five siblings, our address might have been Paradise, for that’s how it felt growing up there. Oh, that every child could be fortunate enough to have a childhood such as the one I had! It is true that the old farmhouse, by today’s standards, lacked every kind of modern convenience. We shared bedrooms and closets and a single very overworked bathroom, where lines would form on school mornings. The cast-iron radiators in the rooms would take your skin off if you set your hand on them in the winter. The windows fought you when you tried to open them. The floorboards warped in the summer heat. Bats lived in the attic and sometimes made it into the house, flying from room to room until we ushered them out through an open window.

But that old house, for all its flaws, had good bones. It rode as steady as a ship through wind and rain and storms, keeping us warm and dry. Is that not, in the end, what we need a house to do?

Beyond our four walls, we had what every kid back then desired, which was room to roam and things to do. We had horses and dogs and cats, and, for a time, a crazy rooster that would chase my older sister around the yard, until one day my father cut its head off and we had it for dinner. The cats bred like rabbits. We never had to replenish our stock of kittens because they were always climbing out between the haybales in the barn. We would hear them mewing before we knew they were there. Shine a light down into the cracks, count the gleaming eyes, and you knew how many kittens there were.

Those six acres, and the meadows and woods that surrounded them, served as the playground for our creative imaginations. There were no computers back then, after all, no Xboxes, no smartphones. Television offered only a handful of channels to watch and besides, the only choices for daytime shows were soap operas, and what kid wanted to watch “Days of Our Lives”?

So out of doors we went, like chicks let out of a coop. Each season offered its own special brand of adventure. In the fall we cracked hickory nuts and gathered pears from the backyard tree for our mother to jar. In the winter we ice skated on the creek and went sledding wherever we could find a hill. In the melt of spring, the yard would turn into a thousand lakes. We were discoverers in a new land, bestowing names to puddles—Elephant Lake, Camel Pond, Snake Pond—and then claiming them as our own.

And summers, those glorious summer months when we were released from the tyranny of Catholic school and could do what we wanted, go where we wanted. Playing whiffleball in the yard. Fishing for bluegills off the bridge with hooks baited with balls of bread. Searching for tadpoles amidst the blooming algae. Kicking up dust on our hand-built go-cart. Carving our names into trees with our trusty Buck penknives. Lying in the hammock in the shade of the great catalpa tree listening to the vibrato cries of cicadas rise to a fevered pitch before fading away.

Now, let it be said that I am no Luddite. I was an early adopter of personal computers and have been using them ever since. My first PC, bought in 1985, was a Tandy 1000 running MS-DOS with as much memory as a newborn in a bassinet. I was constantly swapping out floppy disks to store my documents, but it was a lot better than having to use Wite-Out on the old typewriter.

In the four decades since the computer crawled out of climate-controlled rooms into the lives of everyday people, I have embraced every new wave of technology that has come down the pike (apologies for the mixed metaphor). I made my living working for technology companies where I made good use of my English Lit degree by translating arcane technical concepts into layman’s terms for the general public. When social media came along, I led the charge in convincing my multi-billion-dollar employer to get its brand out onto these new channels so as not to appear like an old fuddy-duddy to the buyers of its computers.

Today, I pay bills online. I am a big user of Venmo for person-to-person payments. I store documents on the cloud. I blog, I post pictures on Instagram, I have thousands of followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, and my other social channels. And here I am now, sharing my journal in an online forum used by millions of people.

No, I am not a technophobe. I can best be described as a techno-cynic. Having worked in corporate marketing for the better part of four decades, I know the tricks that big companies use to shape their public personas and sell their narratives. Those same tricks are used by deep-pocketed political organizations to get us to buy into their narratives and vote for their candidates. It’s all perfectly legal, but also quite insidious, and we, the people, are the unsuspecting targets.

Technology can do amazing things, but like medicine, it has side effects, and those side effects can be worse than the cure. Today’s computers with their algorithms have become so clever that it’s easy for us mortals to make the mistake of thinking the words and images they present to us are the real thing, when in fact they are not, and never will be. It’s a problem that is only getting worse as bots and AI humanoids take over the work of real human beings.

We have forgotten that technology is a tool that serves us, its creator. We have put Technology on the throne and made him King, our ruler and redeemer, the arbiter of all things real and true and worthy. Oh, he is a clever king. He gets us to buy into his games, and there he has us, captive eyeballs in a make-believe battlefield—right vs. left, red vs. blue, conservative vs. liberal—where everyone must have a label and choose a side, because after all, what is a game without a winner?

Meanwhile, our queen mother is waiting. No digital king can ever match the beauty of Nature. Yes, she can be cruel. She demands our respect or the consequences will be fierce. But she is a good mother, and she has much to teach us about the lost virtues of self-reliance, resilience, and the power of observation.

Our queen mother is waiting to take us back to our senses. Back to beauty and truth. Back to Nirvana.

Back to ourselves.