Whats on my mind? Those of you who know me will not be surprised at the answer. A rant. Last night I picked up a passenger in my taxi. He started talking about the kids who were loitering around his business ... a couple of teenaged girls and a guy who looked to be about thirty years old bragging to the girls about how tough his skin was. So tough that he could not give himself a paper cut. Young people these days, and the drivel they spew. Which got us talking about other stuff. He told me he has no car because he doesnt really need one. So, he takes a lot of buses. And what he has been noticing about bus travel these days is the number of people staring into their cellphones. Ahah!, I thought, Ive got one here. A noticer. Thats rare these days. So I took the opportunity to launch into a tirade about what, I think, is a serious downside to the internet revolution, I..E., the seemingly inexorable trend toward gathering lifes experiences from some variant of the cathode ray tube. I then opined that this trend, in my humble opinion, is the primary contributor to a disturbing new phenomenon ... Social isolation. To make a long story short, I realized that we were resonating. So I decided to push the envelope a little bit and mentioned Alex Jones. To which my passenger replied, I LOVE ALEX JONES! And, as you might imagine.... this ushered in a whole new level of enthusiastic conversation. At the conclusion of the trip he shook my hand and thanked me for a great ride. I do not consider Alex Jones to be a libertarian purist. Nevertheless, I am one of his biggest fans. He is an intellectual locomotive. Though I dont buy into his entire package I cant deny that this man has made me think about a lot of things that might not, otherwise, have occurred to me. If not for the internet there would probably not be the Alex Jones influence. There would not be alternative media. There would only be CNN and MSNBC.... and their echo chambers.... like the (gag) Hamilton Spectator. That trip made my day. Until the last few years the odds of meeting someone who was awake were almost zero. So I felt kind of good. After he disembarked I aimed my cab for my nest, the GO Bus terminal. I felt the urge to light up a cigarette. That was when I looked up at the mandatory in-cab camera. Big Brother is Watching Me. So I took a few drags from my e-cig... which Sam Merulla now aims to ban. My goodness. This is pure 1984. Slipped in through the back door. Which also reminded me of my appointment at 1:30 P.M. today at the, so called, Ontario Court of Justice. My alleged offense? Officer Smiley snuck up on me back in April and caught me smoking a mini cigar during what I thought was a moment of privacy. I appear this evening as a thief and a robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them.” -- Frederic Douglass. Well, the good side to this story is that I dont anticipate that justice will impose a painfull horse whipping. Some humanitarian progress has been made over the centuries. Justice, will, in all likelihood, consist merely in a statutorily limited form of extortion. And I am fine (no pun intended) with that. Mainly because I fully understand that freedom isnt free.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 08:49:55 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015