As I stand in the kitchen gently humming to myself and stirring the corn that was about to come to a boil, suddenly with a strange squeak from the still air everything turns black. My first instinct is to turn around and expect to defend myself from the man in black who silently appeared behind, about to stick a knife in my back. 'Oh the power just went out', I announced to myself in the hopes that it might turn back on as my words spilled out. Last night I won a whoppin' 3 dollars and 90 cents playing poker with my mom. And as I stole away with my winnings ( my mom would have easily warned me to not spend it all on one place), the questions began to flood my head. Shortly before we stopped playing the power came back on and my mom's first reaction was to rush back to the paper work she had been doing when the power so discourteously left us. I thought now, how odd it was that my mom and I would never play a game unless there was a lack of technology. Even stranger still, why had she not resorted to her normal reaction which would have been to light a candle and read a book? Further more, was there a sudden love for doing taxes that had possessed her at that moment to rush back to their open strangling arms? Certainly Not! I can assure you that my dear mother hates doing taxes as much as any American in their right mind would. What then stopped her from reading a book at that point? I didn't think I looked that desperate. Could it be simply that she just wanted a change? But if so why now? Why had it become a last resort for entertainment? Had she read a book by a candle I would have been just as pleased. Or had she lite a candle and gently, with a sly smile gently resting under her rosied cheeks, placed it on top of the piano and started playing, the pleasure would have been even more enhanced. But I ask you now, why oh why, do we take the opportunity to enjoy other people's company when there is nothing else to do? When there is no TV to entertain us, no flashing lights on the computer, no nothing except the still silence of burning candles and the asphyxiating smell of oil lamps, why is it only then that we turn to real conversation with our family?
My mom used to tell me that when TVs were just starting to get really big, mothers would leave their children at home to watch TV. This was the new and improved way of saving the money you might have spent on a babysitter. Now we think "what a nightmare!! What if I left my little Mikey at home to watch TV and he found the matches or a knife? or worse, what if he was kidnapped?!?" But the times really haven't changed that much since then. Now we hire babysitters but it is only the person who sits in front of it that has changed. We come home from work in the evenings and we tell ourselves that we have had a long, hard and sometimes hellish day and the only thing we deserve right now is a cold Bud light, our favorite TV show and eventually a nice big bowl of ice cream. Now there is nothing wrong with a bowl of ice cream, or watching your favorite TV show. The problem is that it happens all the time. The problem is that we have made a habit of this. We have crept into this hole wherein a voice is echoing, telling us that all we need is a comfortable spot, a cold beverage and the remote and we are all set to soak up all the useless information in the world.
'Sloth is their god. And Laziness is their Governor.' This is us - Americans. As Edmund Spense points out in his Faerie Queene, if we stay too long in the Palace of Pride (Sin) we simply dehumanize ourselves. So if we depend on technology, we become just like the TV or the Computer that we sit staring at so much.
"Laziness." said the little man "It so wonderful." But is it really?
