It's All Performance Art 104

It is lovely to see sunshine this morning.  Perhaps a bit on the cool side, the temperature right now is 3 degrees.  How easy Google makes our lives.  Just look it up and the information is one click away.  Vancouver temperature right now, 3 degrees.  Could it get easier?  The internet and IT do almost everything for us.  Or potentially anyway.  It is tragic and pathetic to see how completely dependent we have already become.  No one, it seems, could think of even living without their little Precious.  Sad.  And inevitable.  People are so lazy, you know.  If there was an app that would wipe our asses for us, I'm sure there would be at least a few takers.

For me the alarm first went off when I began to notice how many apparently able bodied people, men as well as women, were coming to rely on pressing disability buttons in order to electronically open doors in public spaces. For example, the public library downtown.   For a while, I was doing it myself, but then I began to wonder.  I don't have a disability, so that button, this convenience is not really for me.  Almost the moral equivalent of parking your car in the disability parking space when outside of your lazy and selfish attitude, there is really nothing wrong with you.

So, I thought, what is it about people who are reasonably fit, especially younger people, that makes them want to take the easiest, most convenient route?  Well, human laziness, for one thing.  A lot of us won't lift so much as a manicured finger, if we don't have to.  Which leaves me wondering how this reflects on our character.  Old-fashioned word, character, and a lot of folks are really more interested in having personality, or charisma, or sex appeal.  But character?  That suggests eating oatmeal porridge flavoured with salt and without even a modest sprinkle of skim milk to make it palatable. 

So, now, unless the weather is horrible and I am carrying heavy objects, I just pull or push open those doors, the old-fashioned way.  It's good exercise.  And it keeps me at least a little more independent, and less likely to rely on dubious supports.  I try to think of this as living like an adult.  Or becoming an adult, since we are always becoming adults, never really arriving there.

I think this is why I prefer to walk everywhere.  I don't drive a vehicle, or ride a bike, so my options are public transit or my legs.   Even though it's work, it always feels better doing it myself.  Sometimes I get a bit sore and tired, but really, our bodies have been engineered over the last five hundred thousand years plus to move independently, and excessive reliance on technological supports that deprive us of effort are in a subtle and insidious way dehumanizing. 

Get off your ass, darlings!