Census workers being attacked and threatened? It's happening. There are lots of other signs of dissatisfaction with government, and of a more general malaise in the country these days. It reflects ignorance, and certainly, frustration with the economic disaster brought on by eight years of Bush "spend and don't tax" policies, not to mention an inordinate concatenation of disasters, natural and man-made.
Yet I don't think that explains the extent to which we're seeing unprecedented examples of man's basic inhumanity to man. Another recent news item, for example, points out the rising use of texting to threaten, cajole, and otherwise seek to destroy a person's privacy, perhaps their life.
In a world where we are all supposedly so interconnected via new technologies ranging from smart phones and the internet through social networking and texting, we're really not connected at all -- not in ways that count. The technology in this case has tended to lock people away in compartments.
Real human interaction becomes more and more rare. In the 1940s, you might go call on your neighbor; in the 1960s, you might have phoned him; in the timid new world of the 21st century, you're likely to text him. Rather than going out to a movie, people sit at home and watch a DVD on their gigantic plasma television. They fail to socialize, to learn to deal with others. And naturally, though unfortunately, it's the weird and the dwellers on the fringe who succumb most readily to the tempations of sitting in front of a screen, connecting without connecting.
Virtual reality, after all, is not reality. It all boils down to dysconnection, rather than connection.
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