Today's Children

Today's children text on cell phones, instruments of incalculable knowledge. And yet, most have never seen a starry sky, flickering fireflies, pheasants in flight; or a cocky rooster strut about. Their reality consists of emojis, designed to feed social media's insatiable appetite. Today's children have never seen a cow or a plowed field; they buy their vegetables, meat, and milk prepackaged off the shelves of grocery stores; having never been on a farm. They spend all their time surfing the internet, addicted to their iphones and computer screens; soliciting likes from fictitious fickle friends. Today's children air-kiss, hoping to go viral; quantity trumps quality when you number your friends. And even if a few friendships are genuine, they'll unlikely ever meet in the flesh. Eye contact and handshakes are so blasé they've been relegated to the distant past; inside alternate realities, today's children live in isolation.