"Time-saving"

This reprinted article from one of Reagan’s speechwrites, Peggy Noonan, reminds me of the few lines Palmer Joss spoke in Contact:

The question I’m asking is, are we happier? As a human race, is the world fundamentally a better place because of science and technology? We shop at home, we surf the web, but at the same time, we feel emptier, lonelier, and more cut off from each other than at any other time in history...

(gets drowned out by Pulses from outer space).

... maybe it’s because we’re looking for the meaning, well what is the meaning? We have mindless jobs, we take frantic vacations. Deficit finance trips to the mall to buy more things that we feel are gonna fill these holes in our lives. Is it any wonder that we’ve lost our sense of direction?

Ideas? Opinions?

In it she also makes the following observation (unedited) in 1998:

When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage . . . when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries . . . who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.

If someone does the big, terrible thing to New York or Washington, there will be a lot of chaos and a lot of lines going down, a lot of damage, and a lot of things won't be working so well anymore. And thus a lot more . . . time. Something tells me we won't be teleconferencing and faxing about the Ford account for a while.

The psychic blow--and that is what it will be as people absorb it, a blow, an insult that reorders and changes--will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for longer than a while. Something tells me more of us will be praying, and hard, one side benefit of which is that there is sometimes a quality of stopped time when you pray. You get outside time.

Thursday 09.20.2001 Posted at 11:46 AM

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