Which should we choose? Time to fish or cut bait

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Written By Joan E. Battey

Today’s society is increasingly more attuned to rejecting everything it didn’t invent or decree, than it is in weighing cause, effect and possible needed solutions to problems.  With the wonders of today’s high-tech-everything, we’ve somehow become conditioned to thinking, as was described in earlier decades, very succinctly.  Hasty changes were then described, good or bad, as: “Out with the old; in with the new.”

Older generations had another saying that often came shortly afterward.  Even more situations today could be described the same way, except that things are “sold” differently now.   Earlier the “Don’t cry over spilled milk” meant “don’t waste time. Clean it up and be more careful next time.”  Today, many things can’t be fixed or restored, and time trying to recover enough to repair damages has been swept away. Fixes aren’t possible — and often not allowed, if they were possible. Tinkering to fix glitches is old-fashioned.  “Get over it! Times have changed.” But, “Milk” is the least of what is spilled in today’s hasty changes.

When overwhelmed with almost more things than could be handled without extreme amounts of time and effort, older generations used to say they were “too busy to think.”  They didn’t know about today’s new ways that education was going to change from learning to think, to learning to “demonstrate” knowing how to perform.  They didn’t anticipate that basics would be like so much “spilled milk” — impossible to recoup in the same form as it was spilled.

“No need to think,” just follow the instructions on your computer”.

Do we now have a population too busy to think? Are we like the unicorns in the catchy song years ago — having so much fun playing on the rocks that they missed the last call from the ark, before the floods?

When “we” are faced with overwhelming costs due to higher taxes and dwindling resources, can we really be saved by funds that other people have contributed to increasing taxes and fees, that “we” also have to pay “so others can be helped”?

Should we go back to the advice not to cry over spilled milk, and work our way back to re-string the beads, so to speak?  Or should we try to get a good spot on the rocks if there is still time?

“Variety” used to be “the spice of life.”  Today variety is what color do you want your technology to be updated to, so that you can get hundreds of kinds of things that you are too busy to have time to decipher or totally use.  Unless, of course, you have few other commitments or distractions that you keep you from 24/7 involvement with your time-saving device.

That’s when the last warning for avoiding disasters has come and is in the countdown to “fish or cut bait.”

There are many changes that have been beneficial over time, but only by assessing benefits vs. pitfalls before eagerly endorsing unseen pros and cons before it is too late.


Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”

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