the Telephone

Growing older has many disadvantages but most are because of Habits and things that come on so slow we do not know they are taking our lives the same way a master takes control of a subject of his slave.

When I was a young man still wearing short pants. That alone should be brought to light. You were not to wear long pants until you reached a certain age. This stopped before my time but the saying still has a place.

If I went to a friend’s house when I was a ten years old and he was counting marbles when I went into his home and he looked up and said, “Hello”, then went back to counting  marbles I would get up and go home he was obviously to busy to see me.

If he came over and brought the bag of marbles with him and said, “Hello”, then opened the bag and started to count I would watch for a few minutes and go outside and leave him.

If I were on a date and she was to spend more time talking to someone else than with me I would get up and leave her and never date her again.

Cigarettes and whiskey are habits that are so strong that the person who is addicted to them pays no attention to what other people are smelling or watching. Those are microscopic to what we are allowing to be in society today.

We have allowed the telephone to take precedence over our very fabric of attention either personal or socially. If you laugh at someone who smokes because of health and expense you should really enjoy watching a film of yourself when you cant even go to the bathroom without the phone. Eat a meal without a phone. Read a book, visit a friend, play with a pet. We have allowed ourself to be hypnotized to the point where we are slaves to a phone.

It became obvious to me last night when traveling with two friends in a car and my phone rang. And rang and rang and rang. Each looking to me as if is your hearing that bad you don’t hear that? They are thinking. I said, “I hear it”. But I did not answer it. I found that I was being control by an instrument of mind gathering, mental diversion, that I would not allow.

Who could be on the phone that could not wait till I was the one that decided where my attention should be?  I have be exposed to many things in life that were habits of personal involvement but nothing on this earth has ever touched the fact that I am to stop my very breathing, movements, anything or everything I am doing should come to a halt because of a stupid telephone.

One would not go into public without a shower or personal hygiene, but they will stop whatever is going on to answer a phone regardless if they know who it is or not. Setting across from you when this happens makes me want to say, “You go ahead and talk on the phone I will just set here and fart while I wait.”

            Think about it you could be reading the bible and the phone rings, and you will put down the book to answer the phone. Why not just say out loud. “God will you wait a moment someone more important wants me”. Do you think that is less to me,, when we are speaking and you stop and talk with someone else?

What has became of our social skills that we would  be visiting with our closest friends and let a stranger butt in? Artificial intelligence has not destroyed what we have allowed now, and it will only get worse. We have became a slave to a damn phone. A phone has taken our ability to reason, our ability to think for ourselves, and it has been so slow, and gradual that now it is a common thing.

Forty years ago, if we were setting at a table, and you were to say to me. “just a moment I have to talk to someone,” and you would get up, and go aside, so as to have privacy on a telephone, when you came back I would have been gone.

That’s my very point, not only you, but I have allowed you to do this and have done it myself. What has happened that we have let the telephone control our own thoughts? No habit can touch the fact that we are controlled by this. We would not allow smokers, a drunk, a person who has not showered it ten years and stinks to high heaven. Someone who is naked or dressed filthy to set across from us. Yet we would ignore them to answer a phone. Who is the lowest in respect for the other? And worse yet no one can see it. How can we become such a vegetable in life?

A Messenger,

Verl K.