Photographs

For want of a title, let’s steal from Jim Croce and call it, Photographs and Memories.
For Mrs Bodnar, Cheryl, and Darrald.
Begin.
“Hope lasts as long as wishes are realized, or surrendered.”

Noted author and social scientist Lewis Thomas once made the argument that the most valuable invention of man was the lie detector. For him, the device was good news, that the technology was proof, after millions of years from crawling on our bellies from the primordial ocean, man could not lie. Not without a physical response. He associated his observation with the reasoning that such a trait is only possible through divine intervention.
On the other end of the spectrum, Jacob Bronowski opined that the plough was the most relevant contribution, in that it took nomadic man and gave him the tools to harvest and build civilization. At the end of his research he concluded that the collective purpose of human ant colony had to start with a shared goal, in one location. He believes it to be Jericho.
Personally, I believe the biggest contribution to the harvest of mans awe, wonderment, and creativity, is Cinderella.
There was a time, soon to be forgotten, when a nation of people carried their cultures on the backs of horses, camels and children. The stories they told were the mortar that ensured their survival, and the practice learned became ingrained in all of us. 
We are all in one way or another, the tellers of legends, fables and fairy tales.
And then technology changed, bringing us photography and cinema, sound and color. The inherited fireside gather was replaced with lineups, all of us corralled in the queue, to listen and watch the stories of Disney, Grimms and Dickens, all of them coming to life. And the story survived, and we talked.
We sat in theatres and watched the story, immersing ourselves in the dark, our faces brightly lit by the screen, as our imaginations flourished. We went to war, to the moon and back home. Through everything, the fire and words stayed with us. The message of each never changed, and our culture, our civilization again was carried from the teller to the children. In Cinderella, she found her hope for a prince, a troubled stepmother and discourse of siblings. Triumph of adversity, love, and magic. We took it all to multiple battlefields, and came home, faithfully and dutifully honored by our story.
But there is a new technology here. Social media, high digital photography, instant messaging and teller less banks. There is a hovering erasure above our pages, slowly and surely taking it all.
I have two friends that are both talented photographers. In one I watched him run the streets of Europe, rushing the crowd as his artistic eye searched to capture the explosion of discovery he was experiencing. The other lives in seclusion in the northern most part Canada. It is a colder climate that one can fathom. The pictures she takes are of wildlife, landscapes and water, streams, snow and tracks. Hers are a journey of moving art, jailed in her lens, for her and her alone. All her images are extremely moving, and important.
They both are the lone two anomalies to what I suspect.
Now I witness younger people, snapping photos without end, texting furiously with thumbs moving as fast as the most ardent sign language expert could muster. Their heads are bent and supplicant, staring into an abyss of small screen, oblivious to the periphery of life around them. 
You cannot text the smell of autumn. Nor the smell of a catcher’s mitt in April, when the dust is newly removed from spending the winter beneath your bed. You cannot photograph a nervous kiss. A text will never hold the honesty of pain at the words spoken. As pictures are taken, as the eye moves to the small lens port, the cacophony of everything around is left by the wayside.
I have no pictures of my daughter newly arriving in this world. I do not have in my possession any black and white record of the pride I felt when my grade five teacher took me aside and commended me on the sculpture I had completed. My oldest sister still has it. 
Through everything, my mind holds the record of journey, and it is untouched, perfected of its flaws, and forever unwrinkled by age.
So Lewis Thomas and Bronowski are right. Technology and morality should be married, in some form. One seems to be dependent on the other, as the absence of either, takes our story from us.
Today, so far, the advances we have made are quickly taking us from everything we have known, to the defense of an unknown future, ignorant of its repercussions.
We simply do not talk anymore.
And if you don’t know where that takes us, think harder. The words will come.
And don’t look to Cinderella for help, because last I heard, she was rolling on the floor, coughing up ink.