DEHUMANIZATION

I'm in LaGuardia airport waiting to board for my home-bound leg to Charlottesville and ran out of reading material.  Right next to my gate is a WHSmith selling books so I figured I'd go in and see if they had something worth reading.

                  For the record, if you ever want a day of flying to fly by, assuming you don't have work to do, nothing speeds time like a good novel.  I don't get to read much fiction so when I find myself in these valleys kind of caught up with work projects and without an information-dense nonfiction tome in my satchel, a good novel, especially a thriller, gets my attention.

                  So I go over to WHSmith and in order to get in, you have to insert your credit card in a reader for the gate to open.  I know I'm a dinosaur since I don't yet have a smart phone.  But am I the only one in this airport who views being able to enter a store without giving them your credit card a jarring entrance policy?

                  As someone who has one of the only farms in the world with a 24/7/365 open door policy for anyone anywhere to come and walk around to see anything anytime unannounced, this "enter by credit card only"  seems like a despicable, dehumanizing, discourteous, mercenary howdy-do.

                  After trying to walk through without inserting my credit card and the gate denying my entrance, I came over, sat down, and decided to write this missive.  Am I alone in the world at being offended and incensed at this kind of reception in a place allegedly courting my interest and business?  Do people just assume this is the new matrix?  Is the blue pill that much of our diet these days? 

                  It makes me fear for everything human and biological.  Yesterday at my farm consult near Pittsburgh the family and I talked about our throw-away society.  It strikes me that as a culture, we've embraced throw-away materials, then throw-away agriculture, and now throw-away people.  What is the highest value of people?  Getting their credit card information.  No wonder our teenagers are binging on suicide.  No wonder depression and loneliness are our highest psychological states. 

                  I'm appalled and dismayed that I sit here and watch person after person, without hesitation, come to those gates and stick their credit card into the reader.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if person after person, all day, like me, balked, bent the gate, then backed up and walked away?  On this Good Friday, I feel like we've crucified and buried common human decency.  Will it exist again?  

` The hotel I stayed in last week speaking at a conference proudly displayed a "CASHLESS" sign at the registration desk.  That means nothing in that hotel could be purchased with cash. So long, legal tender.  Hello, the machine.

                  Digitization and reducing all of us to numbers is frightening.

                  Or am I the only one that thinks this way?