Electronic People

9 o’clock in the morning and the electronic chirping begins.  Before long it builds to a cacophony of  beeps and ring tones.  It must be Monday morning.  Let the text messaging begin!

As my own children sit in the kitchen learning Spanish, Pre-Algebra, and American history, their peers are sitting somewhere in a classroom and texting my kids.  After 15 minutes or so I begin replying to their friends “#2 is doing his schoolwork right now and I suggest that you do the same ~ His Mom”  “#1 is busy doing Math.  Why aren’t you in class?  ~ Her Mother”  There are never any apologies, just a brief break between classes before the messaging begins again.

What is going on that these kids have enough free time in school to spend hours trying to reach my kids?  Are there no rules on when they can use their phones? (I’m not convinced that they need phones in the first place.  They’re at school!)  Is this the education of the leaders of the future…ignore the people in charge so that you can have meaningless conversations with people you only kind of know?

If I were the parent of one of these students, I would be furious, with my child, his school, and the people in charge.  But who am I kidding?  If I were one of these parents, I wouldn’t know what was going on and if I did I probably would just shrug it off…the way the parents of my children’s friends do.  The way I do way too often.

There is a fog of apathy in our culture.  It has settled down over adults and children alike.  No one seems to care about anything except alleviating the boredom of the moment, and avoiding anything unpleasant or too hard.  We are a culture of people too tired and disinterested to tell students to put their phones away and pay attention to the people actually standing in front of them instead of the imaginary importance of a conversation taking place in a box.

The dull, glazed eyes of our children are the direct result of no one ever reaching out a hand and turning the darn things off!  The way I did this morning to the stunned disbelief of my children and the shock of their friends.  The pile-up of electronic messages which awaited them on their phones, email, and Facebook pages asking “You’re not answering me.  Where did you go?” would have taken them hours to wade through had I not just deleted the lot.

Our kids are searching for people in this world, people to connect to, people who make them feel important and as if they matter to someone…anyone.  In a world where other people are a mere text message away, why do they all seem so alone?  They keep searching for people, but would they know what to do with a real one if she were standing right in front of them?  I don’t even know any more…