A Herd of Sheep

Did you see/read the story the other day on Twitter will ‘stream’ Thursday night National Football League games?  I’ve become such a fossil I read accounts on this kind of activity and wonder ‘why?’ Are there folks who will watch the games on their smart watches? Obviously, there are or no one would pay money for the rights to stream them.

I’ve spent huge portions of my adult life struggling to have the money for a larger than the table it sits on television and now we want to go in the other direction? Will we have a generation of people with scrunched up faces from squinting at smartphone and tiny watch face screens?  Well, sure! Why not!

I joined Twitter years ago because….well because everyone else did. I shuffle along with the lost when not getting lost in the shuffle I guess. Every once in a while I actually go to the site and realize I haven’t actually lost anything there. Not that this knowledge didn’t keep me from joining Tumblr (no points awarded for spelling on that) and just yesterday, Reddit as well, about which I have NO clue at all.

I look in the mirror and realize I still don’t have a Pinterest account. And this worries me. This is who we are. A sentient, self-aware species yearning to be individuals, right along with everyone else surrounding us. Each of us, heck with that! ALL of us, all seven plus billion or so on this planet, want to be able to rush to the shore or scream at the sea 'hey! look at me!'

If there is a God, how does He (or She; how ironic would that be to learn God the Father is actually God the Mother? And stuff like picking on your brother, taking the last cookie, not making your bed is REALLY the important stuff while faith and good works are as may be? What a hoot.) keep track of us all?

I know that I need only look to the lilies of the field who neither toil nor weave and I realize that not one swallow falls to earth without His knowledge but am I the only one who has days like those of the fisherman who prays, 'Lord, Your ocean is so large and my boat is so small'?

I spend more time on line in conversation or interaction than I do with real people, though at least in theory, the ones on line are as real as those in the flesh and in the here and now. My children are very much at home in this Brave New World, barely remembering the quaint old days of dial up and now part of the migratory electrons that are so many virtual meeting places. Each of us can stand alone-but it's easier to stand alone it seems when you are together.

Maybe that's part of what separates us from the beasts (and all this time I thought it was these nifty thumbs), our knowledge of our finite future. The realization that tomorrow will dawn for some, though not all, of us and that there will be a day when the last person who knows of our existence, themselves, passes from this earth and we cease to be part of the communal context and conscience and become forgotten.

And some one, someplace scrolls over whatever has replaced what we now call this community of connectivity and marvels at the primitive beauty of that which we've left behind. 

-bill kenny