On Tuesday evening, 6 of us from TTN, The Transitions Network, gathered at a dining room table to talk about what we had written recently. We are the Writers Peer Group within TTN. One woman is compiling a book of stories from people suffering with mental illness in order to “stop the stygma.” Another has joined a memoire-writing group at her church. Another shared her sadness in downsizing her belongings in preparation for a move. She had already written about it on FaceBook, but she read it to us. One wrote her “bucket list” in poem form, and one had been writing letters she’d been meaning to do for some time. After we shared what we’d been up to over the past month, writing-wise, we ended the meeting with writing from a prompt. The question this night was, “What would history say about our times that we are living in now?” I dashed off a few lines, imagining what a SOCIOLOGIST MIGHT SAY, because it’s something I’ve been giving some thought to. The response from the other women was astounding. They all agreed that it is so unlike my writing and they insisted that I should post it here. So here it is, in unedited form.

In the early 21st century, the people on Earth fell in love with their technology. Their gadgets changed their social behavior. Their use of language became obsolete. They returned to using pictures and symbols instead of words. They thought they were improving communication, but in truth, they lost the ability to communicate. They used their technology, not to improve the world, but to destroy the world. They began with destroying the individual lives of people they didn’t even know, and then it accelerated to destroying nations. After the destruction of civilization as they knew it, the dominant computer created a world of robots. It wasn’t what God had intended, and so God became obsolete as well. And that was not good.