Today's Children

Today's children text on cell phones, instruments of incalculable knowledge. And yet, they 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 produce, meat, and milk packaged off the shelves of grocery stores, having never seen a farm. They spend all their time surfing the internet addicted to their computer screens; soliciting likes from fictitious fickle friends. Today's children air-kiss and hope to go viral; quantity trumps quality when you number your friends. And even if a few are genuine, it's unlikely they'll ever meet in the flesh. Eye contact and handshakes are so yesterday they've been relegated to the distant past; inside alternate realities, today's children live in isolation.