Athena Came By And She's Pissed.

She rose from her pedestal, descending in a monolithic leap of faith, her softened stone heal found the earth

and it shook.

"Here me! I have sounded you for a certainty and found you wanting."

Ageless and ancient the eyes that have seen and heard the wiles and wales of the mass below for an eternity...and then again. Cheeks rise and pigeon from lips carved, nay chiseled and pursed.  She smells like cardamom and coffee from the East.

"THEREFORE! Rather than spit you out and start again. I will gnash you together until there is no more distinction, no more individuality, no more YOU or THEM. Legs and arms and torsos, mashed like potato and herb until it is one mass of red and brown and yellow and black and blue and pink, a rainbow of flesh blood Bone fluids and identity.

From now on you will look in the mirror and see him, or her, them, and not know the difference. You will eat when they eat. You will drink what they drink, watch what they watch and laugh when they laugh. You will become fracture, splinter, dispersed like a mist into a larger cloud and you will call it "REALITY" and "NORMAL". 

The rain began to fall, marking her floured skin spotted. She looked up into the Sun. 

"How did we let it get like this?"

Then she turned her eyes to the shadows before her, wiped the rain from her eye, then returned to her place above the earth.

"You are losing your children, of what consequence is an IPhone?"

A friend of mine told me a story yesterday about a former student who took her life recently, she was 14. It got me thinking, how many bullied kids have we heard about in the past couple of years submit the same vote of "no confidence" regarding our culture and society? Quite a few, I think, when certainly one is too many.

Kids killing themselves, each other, and routinely dying at the hands of violence is simply unacceptable.The "techno-revolution" has proven itself a charade in its inability to defend its young. What parent would not suggest the same of another who allowed such mistreatment of their own?

"You are losing your children, of what consequence is an IPhone?"

My now half decade of recent educational experience, time spent mostly with your kids and grandkids, has caused me to believe that the STEM of the problem is the pressure our culture has leveraged upon the barely-formed shoulders of a generation in conflict with itself.

The technological age has dramatically increased the level at which we can and do receive information and opinion. It's not like our children's brains were suddenly and magically prepared for the deluge of sensual content that we as adults were having little success in rationalizing, (I submit the fact that federal laws regarding technology are woefully behind the pace of technological innovation as evidence that we STILL have no idea what we are doing).

And yet, we gave no consideration to the evident evolutionary gap between the supply of information and the human ability to consume on a psychological, emotional, and cognitive plane. Even though the evidence was readily apparent in the cultural misgivings towards technology as a double-edged sword, which, if mishandled, or put forth to ill purpose, could result in cultural, perhaps even bigger, social catastrophe, we led our children to the computer desk and then, like a cultural arms race, we chased technology, with our kids in tow, hoping they would somehow understand the chaos around them that we had constructed as reality.

And now our chickens are coming home to roost and what are we doing? Shackling our educational system to the point that innovation is punished. Education is no longer about nurturing children to adulthood and citizenship, the development of the noble, Cosmopolitan. We are building children to compete technologically with our so-called, " global competition."

Have any idea what the suicide rate is like in that country?

So what's the solution? There isn't one. There are millions. They have faces and they are probably somewhere close. Look at them and ask yourself, "if I was your age, what would I think of the world and what would I need to know, what intellectual and cultural foundation would I need to be able to reconcile and navigate the great technological sea?"

What's your answer? If it's, "a new Ipad," you totally missed the point.