In This Together
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
NEW YORK — When two Northwest Airlines pilots get so into their laptops that they overshoot their destination by 150 miles, breezing past Minneapolis like they’d never heard of the place, American self-absorption has clearly reached new heights. No longer just bowling alone, Americans are flying alone.
I couldn’t believe that story. Nobody could when they heard that the Cheney-Cole pilot-first-officer team had swept eastward toward Milwaukee last month. How, even with a name like Cheney, can you forget that you’ve got 144 people on board and are supposed to land a plane?
But the more I thought about it — and thought of the repeated Earth-to-Mars experience of trying to get through to my kids when they’re on their laptops, and thought of how often people thumb-typing on their Blackberries bump blindly into me on New York sidewalks, and thought about how technology now trumps community in the United States (even when that community is 39,000 feet up) — the more I felt those Northwest pilots were symbolic enough.
After 9/11 half of America went to war and the rest went shopping. Wall Street coined newfangled financial instruments to leverage the universe and Main Street fell for them. Division grew, fellowship withered. Everyone knew money could not really rain from the sky in the American dream factory but they went on playing their own versions of online solitaire.
(Continued here.)
NYT
NEW YORK — When two Northwest Airlines pilots get so into their laptops that they overshoot their destination by 150 miles, breezing past Minneapolis like they’d never heard of the place, American self-absorption has clearly reached new heights. No longer just bowling alone, Americans are flying alone.
I couldn’t believe that story. Nobody could when they heard that the Cheney-Cole pilot-first-officer team had swept eastward toward Milwaukee last month. How, even with a name like Cheney, can you forget that you’ve got 144 people on board and are supposed to land a plane?
But the more I thought about it — and thought of the repeated Earth-to-Mars experience of trying to get through to my kids when they’re on their laptops, and thought of how often people thumb-typing on their Blackberries bump blindly into me on New York sidewalks, and thought about how technology now trumps community in the United States (even when that community is 39,000 feet up) — the more I felt those Northwest pilots were symbolic enough.
After 9/11 half of America went to war and the rest went shopping. Wall Street coined newfangled financial instruments to leverage the universe and Main Street fell for them. Division grew, fellowship withered. Everyone knew money could not really rain from the sky in the American dream factory but they went on playing their own versions of online solitaire.
(Continued here.)
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