Musing About My “Jammed” Ball Point
My ball point wouldn’t run smoothly. Perhaps the ink is dried up. No wonder as I now rarely use it. Both my type writers have I given away to pen friends in the country. Just by using a very old type of computer, my ball point, those writing machines now are superfluous, more over the slate pencil and slate and the penholder of former times.
I remember the new curriculum for the elementary school. Is it still necessary for children to be able to write, or sufficient to be able to type? With the progress of technology, perhaps one doesn’t need to be able to type, but just be able to talk which immediately could be transformed into typed script.
Logarithm tables are now useless with the introduction of calculators. The vendors, small shop owners now have one to calculate with ease, fast, accurate, without learning a lot about arithmetic. For pupils of the elementary school we could device a computer that could handle algebra, mathematics, geography, biology, physics, … How fine to be freed of the burden of learning by heart. Should a child spend nine years to finish its elementary education? He could then finish it perhaps within a year.
With faxing, letters are send faster than express letters and even telegrams. One doesn’t need to buy envelopes, stamps, waste time, effort to go and post somewhere. The government post services will be superfluous.
These changes happen so fast, yet am I not yet 70 years old. With the progress of technology, would it make man stronger, more intelligent or on the contrary make him weak and dense because laxness to exert his brains and body?
What we now think as great, superb, will be something out of date in the year 10.000 as a man riding on a camel to flying in a super jet.
In my mind’s eye at that age I see the earth so green, so serene, except the warble of birds, gurgling creeks, whispering leaves in the wind. I seldom see a man, or is it an alien of outer space who is sailing in the air.
Oh, how nice to travel in the air. I didn’t see any roads, streets, highways, railroads, airports. There are no cars, trucks, buses, trains, planes, no factories, … They’re extinct, they don’t need them anymore. If there was, it must be a space vehicle.
They live in ray ban capsules as ray ban glasses, light as though a spiders web, easy to set up anywhere, in the air, floating on a lake or river or in the sea among fishes, anemones and coral reefs.
It is so easy for them to regulate the number of population by family planning and so rebuild the earth into a paradise to be happy for man and all creatures. There’s no sense to burden the earth with a huge world population as it is to day.
I then started from my reverie as I imagined our people race, compete to build tall skyscrapers, luxurious real estates, giant factories, enlarging the cities, broadening the streets to cope with the endless increase of the world population or … to take the chance, advantage to become rich. And thus, the land which was so green so fertile, so serene before, is turning barren, the traffic jammed, life and the government burdened, overwhelmed with headaches.
It’s now 1994 and that was but in the year 10.000 A.D.. What about the year 50.000 A.D.?
From Berita Buana, September 9, 1994
April 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment