We text. We IM. We email. We IRQ. We blog. But we don't connect. We walk blithely by others without seeing them because we're busy texting someone across the world. Middle-aged men, in realizing their Star Trek dream, go sunrise to sundown wearing Bluetooth headsets that isolate them from their surroundings no matter how loudly they talk.
While many advances have brought us together (transportation, for example), and many technologies have made communication easier, since the dawn of man advances in technology have mostly served to remove us from our human-ness. I'm no Luddite, and I don't want technological innovation to stop (I make my living as a software architect), but if you look at many advances you'll see how real, true human connectedness has been dulled through technology.The gun made it possible to kill from far away. I've never been in combat, and I imagine that there are some brutal, gruesome things that happen even with guns - even from far away. But consider the ease with which we can see a life disappear on television when it's just a small hole in someone's body. Consider how it dulls us to kill in a video game (and consider further why video games may be the military's best recruiting tool). Compare those feelings (or lack thereof) to the reaction you had while viewing or even just hearing about the ancient and brutal way in which Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl (and many others) were killed.I had a dream last night where we had developed a Terminator-like soldier shell that could absorb any blast. A soldier would be fired upon from a rooftop and rather than firing back, he'd track the would-be assassin. He'd walk into the building and climb to the rooftop. He'd find the person and whether he was being shot a hundred times it didn't matter; the bullets would just bounce off. Our soldier would crouch down in front of the guy and he'd say: "So, we're friends now, right? No more shooting me or my friends, right?" And the guy would drop his weapon and he'd never fire another.Yes, it's a silly dream, and one that at its core relies on scare tactics and intimidation by a technological superpower who says, essentially: "Look at me. You're going to have to give up, or you're going to have to develop better weapons." But that doesn't stop me from wishing that what made the assassin drop his weapon was the face-to-face connection with his enemy. It's an idea (a strategy?) that's been in use in Iraq for a while now: troops handing out soccer balls, candy, pencils and paper. Connecting. While "connectedness" isn't something the government or anyone can legislate, the idea benefits by being far removed from your typical "sustainability issue." In being so removed, it's an idea that won't completely turn off a third of the population who think "environmentalism" and "sustainability" are dirty words. Computer models have shown us that the earth will recover after we're gone. If there's a sustainability issue we need to address urgently, it's us and our relationship to each other. Will everything else magically fall into place? I don’t know. But a good place to start, I think, is by removing your Bluetooth when you’re not on a call. When you sneeze, pull out one of your iPod headsets so you can hear and thank somebody who says “bless you.” Make eye contact. Share a smile. Reconnect.
