Jul 10, 2017 3 min read

I long for a simpler time, a time of nickel Cokes and 23-cents-a-gallon gasoline, a time when “tweet” was merely a sound made by happy birds.

But all that changed in 2006, when Twitter came along. It seemed like a cute idea at first, restricting tweets to 140 characters. Heck, it might even make users put some thought into what they were saying before posting it for millions to read. Right. And the Tommy gun was a destructive machine so horrible it would end war.

Like many my age, I have the advantage of having grown up in a time when if you wanted someone’s opinion, you usually had to ask for it. And even if you didn’t ask, said opinion usually propagated no further than the number of people within earshot. It was a good process, because although not everyone realized some of their opinions were crap, they couldn’t share them worldwide with the push of a button.

The internet changed all that when it began offering online forums that allowed users to post racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and other inflammatory diatribes under the guise of free speech. I have personal experience in this matter.

As moderator some years ago of a forum ostensibly about trombones, I repeatedly dealt with a user who insisted on peppering each post with profanity. Challenged, he countered with, “I am speaking in the vernacular. Jesus lived with sailors, and you know how they talk.” I pointed out although Jesus did indeed hang with mariners, I didn’t believe his vocabulary included cursing any more than it did “Yar!” and “Shiver me timbers, mateys!” Nor, I continued, would adding profanity to his sermons make them more cogent. “Blessed be the @#$%^ meek, for they will inherit the *%&#$ Earth,” I offered. He missed the ^%$& point.

When Facebook came along in 2004, it elevated the inane to the sublime by creating the illusion that a picture of the massive hamburger on your plate was somehow just as important as a video of you helping villagers in Africa dig a well.

Then came Twitter. And with it, the twits.

Actors. Athletes. Comedians. Politicians. All of whom tried to answer the musical question first posed by Chubby Checker in 1962: “How low can you go?”

Now we have an American president who, confronted with a bar already at gutter level, chose not to raise it again, but to take spade in hand and tunnel.

I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the key word here being “lived.” It is terrifying to me – as it should be to any rational human being – the current occupant of the White House could tweet us into a nuclear war.

It does not give me hope to know when NPR tweeted sections of the Declaration of Independence July 4, many Trump supporters, failing to recognize the words of the document that set us free from tyranny, accused the network of fomenting revolution against the man brave enough to punch out CNN in a staged, doctored video clip.

We put the former host of a reality TV show in the White House, and the season’s just begun.

Big difference is, if this version of reality is canceled, there won’t be any reruns.