casualties of society

My church here in the big K is currently trying to do the same thing as just about every other nominal Christian organization in the world at this particular time of year - throw together a Christmas gala. And in the midst of usual preparations, I received a group email from a lady at the church, rejoicing that the venue had been finally reserved. She, being a good woman of the faith, of course thanked the LORD for providing the venue...or wait...did she? It took me a minute to figure it out as I looked at the bottom of the email which read 'PTL.'

PTL?...PTL? I sat for a minute trying to figure out yet another email abbreviation...the first thing that popped into my head was PTI - Pardon the Interruption - the rapid-fire ESPN show that we all know and love. I honestly wondered for a split second:"Why is this lady talking about PTI???" And then it hit me. PTL - Praise The Lord.

Really?

Giving a punched-on-the-keyboard-half-sentence thanks to the God of the universe is now apparently too much work for even Christians. But I'm not trying to rip on the email lady here - really. She of course did it with a good heart, but therein lies both the point and the question: is that an excuse to go along with all this, quite frankly, shit (PTF - pardon the french) that the vast sea of non-thinkers in our world so unquestioningly accept as 'progressive'? Let's think for a minute...those of us who still can - or rather, who still care to.

High-speed internet...webcams...text messages...ABBREVIATIONS. And I use them all...even the acrimoniously execrable mode of abbreviating the most simple words. G2G...PTL...TTYL...and then of course there's my personal favorite - LOL. Lol, or 'laugh out loud,' to the as yet unadulterated hearts of the world. LOL - I've actually heard human beings who claim to be people use it in verbal conversation. And no, I don't mean the full expression - I mean that I have actually heard the letters L-O-L escape the lips of person - as if it were meant to be a word.
Are you kidding me?!? A text-message abbreviation taking the place of actual words in verbal communication?!? Fifty years ago, it would have taken a coma patient suffering from a combination of down syndrome and Alzheimer's to consider this modern banter 'conversation'! In fact, as a tribute to the men who fought and died for the very freedom of the speech we now seem so incapable of properly practicing; the next time I hear some oblivious, Burberry-clad, ex-high-school-cheerleader-turned-corporate-VP walking down the street, lopping thoughtless 'LOLs' into her cell phone, I will unabashedly snatch it and hurl it into the nearest brick wall, leaving her with nothing to do but...COL - Cry Out Loud.

Am I exaggerating? Yes - barely. Am I making too big a deal out of three letters? Maybe - but I truly think there's more at steak here.

Technocracy. We all joke about it, we all cutely criticize the abbreviations and instant messages...and yet we all indulge...excessively. We're all just swimming along in a sea of pseudo-communication without a care in the world as to how long we can keep treading water.

Let's get serious.

It doesn't take a Martin Luther or a Malcolm X to point out this flaw and warn that if we take this path to its end, we will find it bitter indeed. Our great-grandchildren will be left with the resources of 'Star Wars' but the intelligence of cavemen. Follow the line of logic - that's where it eventually ends. When you find out that your MP3 player has a larger vocabulary than you, its time to raise an eyebrow. There are a few people who should already be raising theirs. Seriously.

In his first novel, Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut prophecies of the fatal day when humans suddenly but apathetically find themselves invented out of usefulness; a day when we have advanced so far that life becomes meaningless. After all, what's the point of a high school diploma - we've got GOOGLE.

Now I'm not sitting here listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary and telling everyone to throw away their iPods and retreat to the days of vinyl records - in fact you'd have to pry my Pod from my cold dead hands before I gave up that tiny bastion of musical might. Now what I am sitting here listening to is the good old nineties rock of Matchbox 20, pleading along with the band to: 'let's see how far we've come.' Come on now - if the ex pop-rock prince Rob Thomas is mourning the state of the union, I think its sufficient to say that we ought to take a look around, and maybe, just maybe, face the fact that simply riding the rapid wave of the world-wide-web might not be the best way to live. In fact it might not be living at all.