Reach Out and Touch Someone

Reach Out And Touch Someone

    I know I’m not alone in this, at least I don’t think so. But sometimes I feel a little isolated from everything and everyone. Lonely. I sit here all day on my computer and I check my facebook page (122 friends and counting), go to Twitter (328 followers), check my email, go to author pages, watch videos, and even answer my cell phone when it shows a caller ID I recognize (which don’t happen often – trust me). In spite of all that, I still often have this queasy uneasiness that, if I have to put a finger on it and give it a name, that name would have to be loneliness. I stay with my elderly father who sleeps a good part of the day and doesn’t talk much when he’s awake. So I don’t get real face to face contact with anyone most of the time. So unless, when I go to the grocery store, someone accidentally rams their shopping cart into mine, I have very little interaction with my fellow human beings on a face to face basis. On the weekends, when I actually do get to go home to my wife who lives fifty miles away, I’m like a sponge and enjoy every minute I get to be in the same room with her.

  So why am I bringing this up here and now? It just strikes a disharmonious chord in me when I look around at all the ways we have to reach out and touch someone these days like smart phones, ipads, the internet, and twitter to name a few. And I just can’t help but wonder if all that is bringing us closer to understanding one another or putting up a barrier every bit as daunting as Captain Kirk’s deflector shields at full power. I can easily imagine a time when we will no longer interact with one another face to face. Our machines will do all that for us. Today at least I still have my wife, my kids, my family. But if you were to take all that away so that you would not ever feel someone’s arms around you, never press your lips against another’s, never hold someone’s hand while you walked together down the street, would texting them or seeing their face on your computer screen be enough? Would we still even be able to call ourselves human if we came to that point? From my own personal experience, I don’t think so.

  I know, I can hear some of you laughing and saying there’s no way that would ever happen. No way it will come to that point. Really? If you’ve been alive long enough, you don’t even have to use your imagination. When I was a kid, we never locked our doors. We knew all our neighbors. Even in grade school, if I liked a girl, I got on my bicycle and rode to her house to talk to her face to face (who am I kidding – I was so shy - I just rode in front of her house hoping she would come out so I could wave to her and then speed away as fast as I could pedal.) People were friendly and courteous to one another, even strangers. Now the only way I’m talking to a stranger is on the internet with miles and miles between us. Most of us don’t know our neighbors or at least not many of them and wouldn’t dare leave our doors unlocked at night. That gets worse the bigger the city. And the cities just keep getting bigger and bigger. When there are no menial tasks left that aren’t being done by robots, and you can do all your own work from home as many people are already doing, who are you going to reach out to and hold when you start feeling that lonesome feeling? Who will know you well enough to even care?  No, the future looks lonelier and lonelier to me all the time. Maybe it’s not too late to start thinking about where we really want to go with all our technological advances. And maybe the real question is, for convenience sake, are we about to give up our very souls, or at least the very essence of what it is to be human? You might want to think about that a little before you run out and buy the next big thing that puts itself between you and a real human being. For now anyway, do yourself a favor and put that gadget in your hands down and reach out and actually touch someone.