Return To Innocence

RETURN TO INNOCENCE

I already have one piece in my portfolio concerning this topic, but it's still very relevant, especially considering what's happened in the world in just the past few days.

This song reminds me of my childhood, as I’m sure it does for a lot of other people from my generation. Granted it wasn’t the innocence of the Garden of Eden (before that apple eating incident, anyway), but times were so much simpler back in the 70’s, even with a war going on that divided the country and brought drugs onto the forefront of America.

Considering what’s going on today in not only this country, but the entire world, it pales in comparison. Terrorism was a word that was used only once in a great while in a small article on the back page of the newspapers, and even then it dealt with small third world countries on the opposite side of the planet. School shootings had never even been thought of, and neighbors would wave and smile to each other, even if they didn’t know their first or last names. Carjackings and serial killers (although I’m sure the latter was happening, but not as frequent) never made the national news, and George Orwell’s ‘big brother’ could not even be imagined. Computers were only for sophisticated scientists sending men to the moon on rockets, whereas today we can have our entire life savings stolen because of identity thieves hacking into our laptops. And speaking of computers and laptops, email was something we might have seen on ‘The Jetsons’, but now it allows us to ‘reach out and touch someone’ with just a few taps on a keyboard. They claimed it would bring us closer, but in my honest opinion I think it’s done just the opposite; people don’t ‘talk’ to each other anymore, at least not face to face.

I guess my question is: are we better off now than we were back then? Perhaps we are in some ways, but overall? I don’t think so. It’s always been my belief, and always will be, that technology will be the catalyst of our doom, the end of civilization as we know it.

To quote Bruce Hornsby, ‘This is the end of the innocence…’

And to quote Enigma, I only wish we could ‘Return to innocence…’