For awhile, I could swear I was in church. Early last Saturday morning, I was sitting in an audience in Ritchie Auditorium at St. Cloud State University.
I was there to see my niece receive her master’s degree.
Before the ceremony began, all around me there were so many heads bowed, everyone looking solemn, as if in silent prayer. They weren’t praying. They were absorbed in iPhones, their fingers flickering away, their minds not on the here and now but in cyber space. If this isn’t some kind of mass addiction, I was thinking, what is? I could almost see rhinoceros horn-buds on their foreheads. I chuckled.
But then again, I decided it’s probably as good a way as any to kill time. Still, I felt relieved to see people who were not attached to iPhones, old-time people conversing pleasantly with one another, cracking jokes, having a good time, like pre-tech people used to do.
Later, that same night, I attended the Sauk Rapids-Rice Prom where I saw the same thing: long rows of people, sitting waiting for the show to begin, many of them with heads bowed reverently, feeding their cell-phone habits. How many of those people, I worried, fiddle with their i-phones when they’re driving? A scary thought. Again, the rhinoceros images came to mind.
Earlier, while waiting in a long line to get into the prom show, I saw a woman plug her iPhone into a plug-in on a wall in the hallway. She stood there as if tethered to a lifeline. Next to her was a woman who was showing her something on her own phone. Rhinos at a watering hole.
Yes, I know, I know, I’m just an old fuddy-duddy bucking this brave new world of techno marvels. Some young upstarts assure me I’d have an iPhone or iTablet or iThis or iThat, too, just like “everybody else,” if I could only figure out how to use them.
Well, I beg to differ. My daily work on my computer is as “cyber” as I care to get, thank you. I have absolutely no desire to “portabalize” my computer so I can carry it around with me and fiddle with it in the form of an iPhone. I have better things to do. I do, however, carry a plain old cell phone but only in case of a serious emergency while driving – and I do mean serious. I have yet to make a social-gab call on it. That’s what my at-home land-line phone is for.
So, as the young ‘uns tell me, I guess I’m just a stubborn old goat.
“Goll, Denny, get with it!” young relatives tell me. “Like, join the new century, why dontcha!”
I do get a bit alarmed when I see people my age (the geezer class) sporting iPhones and other electro doo-dads. They’re the very ones who used to scoff – just a year or so ago – at all the foolish, unnecessary gizmos young people are so crazy about.
“It’s all a fad,” they used to say. “It’ll pass.”
Old hypocrites. Here they are now, sitting in clinic waiting rooms, fiddling with their i-Phones, gray heads bowed to the little phone gods.
I keep thinking of Berenger, the lead character in a “Theater of the Absurd” play called Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco. In a little French town, a few people turn into rhinos. Everybody is appalled, but then one by one they all willingly morph into rhinos themselves. Not Berenger. In the last scene he’s trying to keep the infectious “rhinoceritis” at bay as he bellows in desperation, “I’m not capitulating!”
Ionecso’s play is a comic send-up of mass conformity. Every time I see so many people in an audience bowed toward iPhones, I chuckle because I think of that play, and I visualize rhino horns growing out of their heads, and then I almost want to bellow, like Berenger, “I’m not capitulating!”
Yes, young friends, old comrades, I realize this is the 21st Century, but I don’t want to catch “cellphonitis.” Not just yet, anyway.
