Grandma Moses, we need you!
Sometimes I look back on how different things used to be, and can hardly believe I’m still on the same planet.
Yes, they had block dances on the school blacktop in the evening. Nothing could be more harmless. The three of us kids watching from the upstairs window. Ray Bradbury got a lot of mileage out of scenes like this. So did Grandma Moses. How wise they were!
Can you imagine such a scene today? It would turn into a riot.
Culture rot has advanced very far indeed.
Wow! Does this brief intro take me back!
This was among our Saturday morning TV treats from 1958 to 1960–Circus Boy, starring Mickey Dolenz (they called him Braddock then), who years later was famous again as one of the Monkees.
A traveling circus in the Old West–what could be cooler than that? Oh! I forgot! We aren’t allowed to like the circus anymore, and there never was such a place as the Old West.
Anyway, given the format, this show could and did go anywhere. Just about anything could happen. And there’s something about it, something subtle, that brings to mind some of Ray Bradbury’s stories.
Huh? Ray who? What’re you talking about?
I thank God every day for my 1950s childhood. But alas, we who had it didn’t know what we had, and we let it slip through our fingers. God help us, stranded in this lamentable 21st century.
May God equip us to conquer it for Jesus Christ our King.
I like to play games on Pogo. I like to chat with my Pogo friends while we’re playing. It’s relaxing. It’s nice.
My wife plays a lot of Pogo, and she likes to win “badges.” A badge denotes that you’ve achieved something or other in the course of playing a game. Players like to collect badges. I’m not into that, but that’s me.
As I play, from time to time a certain advertisement appears in the chat box, offering you the power to “complete and win hard badges quickly”… by signing up for robots, “Badge Bots,” to play the game for you.
It reminds me of someone I knew long ago, who was too lazy to go to the unemployment office to collect his check. We called him “Clams”–although the average clam was a lot more dynamic than he was.
Sheesh! Are we grown too flaming lazy even to play our games? Where’s the fun in having some robot play your games for you? Are we too dull, too inert, even to relax? And what kind of gavone brags about all the badges he “won” by letting Badge Bots win them? Where’s the achievement? How many of us, really, are that dishonest with ourselves?
Other robots turn our lights on or off–you have to shell out for “smart” lights that will obey the robot’s order–because we’re too torpid to flick a switch.
I heard somewhere that the civilized world has an epidemic of obesity. I wonder why. Well, at least we still have the energy and the drive to stuff our faces non-stop. Is that the one thing we don’t want robots to do for us?
I’m reminded of a story Ray Bradbury told in The Martian Chronicles, a poignant, somewhat poetic piece in which all the human colonists on Mars are dead and gone but their robots mindlessly keep performing their now pointless tasks of housekeeping the now uninhabited houses.
Let’s not go there, okay?