Cyber Humanity

Music of Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Segovia, all flow through me as I journey in my mind while my body is sedentary. I travel in the space of others as I read their minds and hearts through their pen in the medium that now makes us all accessible and vulnerable.

The cyber ‘blogs’ that provide a conduit to each others personal space that before could not be experienced allow sharing of heart felt thoughts and the simple daily mundane that is our lives. This cyber community provides us an opportunity to share a human condition as never before spending time with each other, strangers otherwise. We can sit in each others home and pet your dog or see how your closet holds the choices of clothes, their colors, their style indigenous in the far away land of where one lives. The setting of your kitchen table, the food you consume, the literature you read, the music that you choose to listen. The faces that share your bed and sit next to you and embrace you warmly when all else exists outside your domicile domain as lights are dimmed and your head rests on your pillow for the nights refrain.

I sit here in comfort and peace in the pleasure of leisure that is made more poignant or significant when viewing the photo shots, stills, that bring into my world a child’s face, unwashed because there is no access to the luxury of a washroom let alone the luxury of clean water. At this moment I sit listening to the timber of guitar strings being precisely trilled and fretted by a genius in his craft. I'm viewing a ‘youtube’ video of the devastation to our gulf and wild life as crude oil spills, the result of an explosion to a man made drill well. Then there’s the video showing a flooded Nashville, Tennessee that has left many families homeless and the loss of life. Most personal to me are the video’s and stories I’m seeing and reading concerning the inhumane treatment of Mexican people in the state of Arizona by a stoke of a pen. Whether walking or riding in a car, one is stopped and asked for ‘papers’. Anecdotally, imagine a mother, who has her papers, is walking or driving her kids to get ice-cream, taking them to school or the grocery store, she forgets to bring her papers and is stopped by police. She is hand cuffed in front of her children and taken to a holding station, jail or otherwise. She must convince her incarcerators who are of the mindset that all who look like her, dark skin latina, are without rights and are held for hours until they can retain an attorney or get a relative or friend to go to their home and get their papers. The community she now resides in has been inculcated with the ‘mass hysteria’ that anyone with black hair and tan dark skin is the focus of blame identifying that all ‘crimes’ being committed against the ’white skin’ people who also believe that the land in which they reside is theirs by right of their own legislated and implemented laws. The brown skin people who had resided there many years prior to the ’white skin’ people forcing them out of this land is now an environment where ‘the Mexicans’ are ‘illegal’ in their own land. It saddens me because underlying and surreptitious in this mindset is the nefarious and insidious bellowing of prejudice and bigotry.

The irony of this access is that although we are now in each others lives, a distance is created in a vicarious existence from actual human contact and all the nuances of real human empathy.