Push-button Society, al borde de un ataque de nervios…

That’s what we Americans are, a push-button society, coddled and cuddled, just push a button for everything, then don’t even wait for the results, just assume that the button delivers the goods as ordered, even more so now that we’re all digital, with digital demands and digital expectations, virtual commands and virtual libations, all bundled in one perfectly-priced package and displayed for consumption…

These buttons all connect to machines, off course, machines designed to make our lives better, supposedly, but in reality divorcing us from the very source of our own being, Nature, while killing that very source, too, so to leave us with nothing, eventually, no machines and no Nature, either, victims of our own excess, and our own unreasonable expectations. Hey, at one point, there were even push-button cars, trying to get women interested, I suppose, by allowing you to shift gears by button. Remember counter-top blenders?

That’s what America is known for, of course, our covenants with conveniences, our deals with devils, our unlimited leisure, unparalleled pleasures, man-caves and boy-toys, gadgets and gimmicks, ready-mix and jiffy-bake, cheese food and Sunday spread, online religion and spray tans, janitor-in-a-drum and cheerleaders to beat the band, a culture born of Nature and divorced from it with no great ceremony.

It’s sad, really, that our main goal in life is to one-up our Mother, second-guess our Father, living out our lives in darkness, our death wish, lining up to do battle with enemies of our own choosing, never at peace with life itself, the very act of pushing the button on the automated garbage disposal rather than tossing the trash an act of civil disobedience that defines our culture and our natures—but not Nature.

Who conquered whom, anyway, and who invented what? Now we’re slaves to our air-conditioners and our automobiles with barely a clue as to how we got here or where to go now. After all, most people can barely change the oil in their car, much less repair the engine, far less see the damage that it does to our environment over decades centuries and millennia of unbridled use, which likely won’t happen anyway, unless it’s the last family standing, with a mechanical mind and a monkey wrench to boot, we’d rather ride the last Chevy off into the sunset, rather than adopt a sustainable path to the future.

A polite person never takes the final spoonful of anything, whether it be ice cream or Ice Capades or ice floe futures. All dreams are frozen in the era of global warming, futures on hold and plans on ice, waiting for divine intervention and praying the next day will be greener than grayer…

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