Bill Moeller Commentary: Technology Is Taking Away Our Humanity

Posted

I’d already written this column for last week but felt that some thoughts on Veterans Day should have precedence, so here are a couple of late observations about elections I’d like to make before we settle down to our turkey. Was Election Day somehow better “way back when?”  

You be the judge.

The main difference this year from the old days was the small group of people waiting for the returns to be announced at the Lewis County Courthouse. There was a time when you’d be hard pressed to find standing room there on election night. 

Today, the results are made known only minutes after the polls officially close, but the excitement of the event has been forever lost.

Election night was a long suspense-filled procedure when I first arrived in Lewis County to work at KELA. It wasn’t unusual for the final results of some contests not to be known until 2 or 3 a.m. I was kept busy either operating the radio equipment, reporting the results or interviewing the winners and losers (if the latter hadn’t already left the building).

Bill Tilton was invariably sitting at a calculator adding up the results as they were brought in from the various polling places in the county. Many times those results weren’t even delivered until after midnight, when they were then counted and added to the totals.

As the evening wore on and the tension rose over either an issue or a candidacy, many people stayed until the last vote had been counted and KELA went off the air. I doubt that that’d happen today.

The results we broadcast weren’t official, of course — it might take two weeks or more until the final tallies were made, but, except for an instance in later years when I was running for mayor and trailed by five votes with only 10 absentee ballots yet to be counted, they were usually correct.

Today, though, every stage of the process is done by electronic machines, and the excitement of the event has been forever lost. Even the very act of voting had a small-town charm to it. You went to the polling place for your particular precinct. You chatted with friends or neighbors or perhaps even with the people behind the desks, if they weren’t busy answering questions from the voters.



The point I want to make is that the entire event was an occasion for individual association with other human beings. It consisted of eye-to-eye contact instead of talking or texting messages into a hand-held device and then waiting for a reply. 

The technology that was touted as a way to bring people together has, instead, separated us into our own individual cubicles. It’s not the only instance where the results of technology have been opposite from what we were told. 

Remember when computers were touted as being the means to achieving a paperless society?  Have you looked into your own wastebasket lately? Credit cards were going to shorten time at checkout counters. Have you stood in line behind another customer as he or she laboriously typed in all the numbers required by his or her new card?

I know I’m just a cantankerous old fart from the past that won’t — or can’t — “get with it.” I plead guilty to the charge, but I’ll continue to maintain until they scatter my ashes in the Seminary Hill Natural Area that technology is taking away our humanity more and faster than we want to admit.

Do you suppose that, perhaps — just perhaps — it could be one of the reasons for the apparent increase in violence we seem to be experiencing, that we no longer know how to react as human beings toward one another?

Footnote: Only a third of the eligible Lewis County voters cast ballots in the recent election, but I’ll bet two-thirds gripe about it afterwards.

•••

Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.