Is the Internet actually evil? No more so than the telephone lines or the equipment that handles millions of calls a minute. The Internet is a virtual Post Office. Nobody can possibly maintain an effective vigil on postal mail and telegram and teletype and messenger-delivered and air-freighted that pass between millions of people at a time, much less the CMT — Casual Message Traffic — that has developed electronically, where someone might write into their facebook or twitter log several dozen times an hour, the equivalent of snail-mail output of hundreds of letters per day to hundreds of friends all over the world, and all that electronic chatter is sent over some kind of wire, whether metal, light-optic fibre, radio, short-wave, wireless transmitter, Atlantic Cable, or somebody pounding on a talking drum.
The mail services around the world do not typically encourage their folks to send porn through the mails, but all over the world, they do, and in other countries besides the United States, they don’t have to send them in “plain brown wrappers” as folks used to do back in the Good Old Days, 1930 to the present time, yet we don’t say that the mail services are responsible for porn.
Scavengers and derelicts and scoundrels abound, but then, they always have. Anyone unfortunate enough to end up a victim of some kind of Fagan, the pickpocket boss from the musical “Oliver”, based on “Oliver Twist”, a famous Dickens novel about a boy who went from pickpocket to millionaire overnight, just by singing instead of talking.
These days, all the wrappings of civilization and the veneer of congeniality have been stripped away. Never mind who’s at fault. People who are badly educated or uneducated have no idea about the world beyond their own skins, and no concept of a world larger than their immediate territory and personal needs.
The United States used to have one of the finest educational systems in the world. Today, it ranks near the bottom, and that includes many undeveloped nations.
Education pays off. Continue reading