By Trent Rosser

Soap box time! That is right, I haven't been on the old soap box for a while so I will have to dust it off and drag it back out again. This time I want to complain about the sorry state of affairs this world is in. I blame technology!

Just the other day, Mark Zuckenburg disabled President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram account until the President-elect Joe Biden takes office. Mr. Zuckerburg claimed that “His decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the US and around the world.”

OK, let's stop there for a minute. I agree that he should not condone anything that happened at the Capitol, and he should condemn their actions. But was anything done when Maxine Waters called for disruption and riots when she said, “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

I guess that is alright, I guess he only believes in free speech to his friends, and anything that he believes. But if he does not like it. Then it is a hate speech and should be banned. How many times did Facebook delete one of President Trump's posts? This is just an example of what is wrong with the world.

I believe that the biggest thing that is wrong with this world is technology (as I write this on a brand new laptop Chromebook)! Technology has pushed us to stay inside and stop using our brains. For example, If you needed to know about how much your net pay would be per week or per year, you would have to break out the good ole paper and pencil and start doing some math. Things that you were taught in school. Now, we just pull out our phones and swipe left to the calculator and find the answer. What about if you were needing to cook something new for dinner? You would have to open the old cookbook that your grandmother left you, then rummage through to find a good recipe. Now, you just type something into Google and all kinds of recipes will pop up. How about car trouble? Remember having to go to the auto parts store or the public library to find a book that had your type of car and read up on it to try to fix the problem?

Then came technology. I believe that it all started with video games. The Atari was one of the first. Kids, (including myself) would stay inside on a nice day just to stare at the TV screen watching a dot bounce back and forth between two little lines. Pong was the game. Then came the computers. Commodore 64 was one of the first personal home computers that I had ever seen. Through the years they have become smaller and could hold much more data than ever.

Finally, technology hit the communication world. You could go to a store, spend three hours waiting on them to professionally install a cell phone in your vehicle. Shortly after the dreaded bag phone. Yes, you no longer needed to find a phone booth or go to a home to make a call, you had a bag phone. It was cool at the time, but looking back on it now, I'm sure it looked like I was trying to call in an air strike on the neighborhood. Like computers, cell phones have become smaller and smaller. They even have them on your watch! Like an episode of “Dick Tracy” you can call for police back up from your phone. Cell phones have adapted so much that I am under the impression that when the Apollo landed on the moon there were two rooms just for the computers to make it happen. All that storage and memory that helped them land on the moon is now compacted into your cell phone. It has come a long way from rotary phones hanging on the kitchen wall!

Here is something that some people might not remember. Laserdisc movies. Yes, just before the VCR came out there were Laserdiscs. I watched many movies on that as well. Then came the VCR and Blockbuster rentals and rent movies for a couple of days. Every Friday, we would go to the grocery store with my father and then rent a movie’s for the weekend. DVD and Blue Ray came and became the greatest thing next to sliced bread! Now in the year 2021 even they are slowly becoming obsolete.

Technology has stopped us from meeting with our neighbors, going out to see the sites around town and even going out on vacations. Why go see the Great Wall of China when you can download Google Earth and see it from the comfort of your couch? Kids would go out in the morning and play all day long outside. We would jump on our bikes and use something that most people no longer have…..an imagination. We would be Evil Kinevil jumping across 50 cars as we hit the homemade ramp. And, of course, every kid on the block would try to get higher and farther than the other kids. Even when we crashed and broke an arm.

I guess it is safer now. You must wear a helmet and pads while on your bike. Nets are around the trampolines. But technology has changed us all. We play football on Xbox, we do taxes on the computer and we check our heart rate from our watch and check our mail and pay bills from our phone. Yes, we all have changed and the younger generation has lost out on all the fun that the imagination could come up with. The technology is for them. They can understand it like we can not. The old VCR is an example. In 90% of the household, the clock on the VCR flashed “12:00”. To correctly set the time on it required a Bachelor's degree….. Or a 13 year old kid. Either way, they know all about the WIFI, but they have no idea on how to jump from a trampoline to the roof of the house without getting hurt…… except for a few of us that broke a nose on the eave of the house, but that's another story for another time.

Yep, Technology is what is wrong with the world!