One of the things I always liked about Howard Johnson's as a kid growing up was the choice of ice creams for dessert after dinners with Gramma and Grampy. At the time, this was the Sixties (GASP!), there were (I think) twenty-eight flavors. I'd always pick chocolate but it was nice to know there were so many others. Of course, Hojo's as they were then are not now, nor is the world in which they existed close to the one in which I grew up. Progress is what progress does-the dogs bark but the caravan moves on.
Thanks to the convergence of technologies we have means of gathering and sharing information we didn't have when I was a kid (we had computers but no one 'normal' ever saw them as they were huge machines the size of rooms, fed by punchcards) all gathering up news and notes we desire and delivering all of it to our desktop or the screen on our smart phone or device.
Remember when we referred to this jumble of wires and ether as The Internet (both with caps)? We were Such Hosers, eh? Now we have news aggregators that are so transparent and seamless we have no idea where the item that just showed up in our news stream actually began. Add to that, the growing number of readers and netizens who cannot distinguish between opinion and fact (the demarcation is stunningly simple unless you're sadly stupid), and we, as a nation or a neighborhood, descend into discord and disintegrate.
We were Athens-we are becoming Sparta. And don't mistake me, we are each entitled to our own opinions, but we are never allowed to have our own facts, be they on anthropogenic climate change, creationism or gay rights. I suspect you and I have very different views on just these three items not to mention the deeper and more fundamental issues such as the Yankees' trading Eric Milton for Chuck Knoblauch.
We can agree to disagree, which is how our parents functioned or we can hurl invective at each other like the morons we elected to represent us in Dodge City (and they do a fine job as they seem to be as imbecilic as we are-at least your guy is, mine is a genius (see what I mean?)).
How we view the world has a lot to do with the window and prism (filter) we choose. You pick Fox and I take CNN. You tune to MSNBC and I like the Cartoon Network. You read The Blaze and I subscribe to the Daily Kos. For me, it's perspective and for you it's propaganda. Tomato, tomato; potato, Dan Quayle.
Someday we'll have a meeting of the minds, as Isaac Asimov once feared, but it will be in the middle of nowhere, beyond the city limits of common sense or decency. And the first thing we'll do is argue about how we got there and, more importantly, who is to blame. After we round up everyone who knows more than we do. Leaving just us, as horrible a fate as either of us can imagine.
-bill kenny
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