Friday, March 14, 2008

Day 12-- The Dark Side Beckons

Day 12
Wednesday March 12th
Has it really come to this? I mean seriously, is this it? Rock bottom? The end of the road? The last straw? The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back? (Okay I can do this all day...) Aristotle, Cicero, Socrates, Plato, Confucius, Virgil, Homer, and Sun Tzu all changed their world and ours with a thought. a single well formulated thought. Locke's Letters of Toleration, Luther's 95 Theses, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Rousseau's Social Contract, The Federalist Papers, and Paine's Rights of Man changed how we think of each other with the stroke of a pen. Sprinkle in liberal use of the new-found printing press and Viola! the Age of Reason explodes! Thoreau's Waldon, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Faulkner, Samuel Longhorn Clements, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Kesey, Garcia & the Dead, Timothy Leary ("Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out!") changed how we perceived, interacted with, expanded, and enjoyed with the world around us.

The New World was discovered by a handful of burly Italians with a sextant. The American West was conquered by pioneers with nothing more then flint lock rifles and hand-stitched buckskins. The ancient Mayans discerned astrological cycles with only sheer cunning and granite pyramids. Men with only a dream and a couple thousand pounds of high-octane rocket fuel played golf on the moon. Incredible achievements have been made, civilizations built and crumbled, reasons discovered and lost. All of this has been had without the use of a bloody cell phone. How on earth did our fore bearers survive? How did the 2nd Continental Congress adopt the Declaration of Independence without text messaging? Or the Magna Carta penned without an iPhone to Google the various peculiarities of the Crown? Magellan accomplished much without a cell phone, Lewis & Clark forged their way through half of North America without a cell phone or GPS, crap even Marco Polo traveled to and documented the Orient without a camera phone.

And now after almost 31 years, I have succumbed to the beast. I wonder how I lasted this long? So here we are I suppose, and me with a frickin cellie. A brave new world indeed...


Take me to your leader...!