The View From Prospect Hill

On October 6, 2007, in Uncategorized, by The News Staff

Prospect_hill_tower_1_3_8_2  This world we live in is getting crazier and crazier every day. The days of the lone extremist are long gone ‚Äì everyone seems to be either oblivious to anything important outside their own little cocoon or they want to lead the march of the seven tribes to wrong the right (you get the idea).

The events that happen in our daily lives and more specifically the forward movement of time, change the way we all process the non-stop barrage of information thrown at us in this age of the Internet. Its no wonder our kids are smarter than we are – the scope of information available to them is almost limitless and instantaneous.

Growing up in Somerville in the 60s, 70s and 80s, some of us were lucky to have a Webster’s Dictionary or a series of Encyclopedia Britannica – the fact that one of us had a subscription to Auto Week was almost unfathomable in our neighborhood.

We walk around in our daily lives collectively as a nation of people armed with more electronic gadgets than you could have ever thought possible even ten years ago (never mind the 80s or 70s). Anyone walking down the street can make the next YouTube sensation out of nothing notable. What does that tell us about the world we live in?

Now here comes this guy, in this world where everyone seems to carry some kind of digital camera on them, who (almost) gets away with stealing 123 parking meter heads? Not to sound like alarmists (no the media would never do that), but it would seem to us that robbing a bank would be easier, less public and certainly one hell of a lot quieter.

And yet, there’s the rub – we walk around with all these gadgets, make fun of the jackass that manages to catch Britney Spears in the bathroom at Subway (even though that jackass probably made more off a crappy cell phone image than you will in your entire life) – and someone gets to walk around back and forth between two of the most densely populated cities in the country – and smash the heads off of over 120 parking meters without being caught on video. And yet we get a parking ticket for being parked for 16 minutes in a 15-minute space.

Maybe Newman is right – we should all start riding bikes to work.

 

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