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Day’s Verse:
You have put gladness in my heart, more than when their grain and new wine abound. In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for You alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.
Psalm 4:7-8
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My family is so newspaper-interactive! This time my mom got her letter to the Editor published (look for Mare Sullivan). Her point: in the article Choosing the Red Pill, the journalist reports on the new Matrix Online MMORPG and the phenomenon of players calling people who stayed plugged in “blue pills.” Mom’s comment:

There is a shockingly obvious irony missed by your reporter as she reviewed the coming “Matrix Online” MMO game. Every subscriber who logs on is effectively becoming a Blue Pill. These individuals are choosing to live vicariously, as scriptwriter Paul Chadwick aptly describes, in “a virtual world that’s being collectively dreamed by people… [who] actually haven’t awakened to the fact that it’s an illusion.” Join the resistance. Reach out to engage in the messy but infinitely more satisfying real world of family, friends, neighbors, even strangers. Choose the Red Pill. Log off.

I think this is a point worth considering for many of the people whose daily experiences have shifted from real lives to cyber-lives. It’s not just people who play MMO’s, either; how easily can you get on the computer, then look at the clock and realize with a gasp that an hour has elapsed? Or two? Or three? The allure of the computer and its accompanying internet is, I feel, increasingly just an illusion.

– KF –