THE DEATH OF A LANGUAGE

I remember when i was growing up my mom would make my sister melissa and I attend what she called "Family Meetings". My sister and I would have described it as torture in disguise. But the reasoning for it was based on something that seems to be a fading part of our american culture. My mom wanted us to communicate what we were going through in life and she wanted us to share our feeling on things that were going on in the family. I hated this process almost as much as my sister did, probably more now that Ithink about it. My mom grew to hate these family meetings, mostly because of our obvious distaste for them. I know this because they got called less and less. So in my family and the many familys I get to work with I often wonder why we don't communicate better. What is it about talking with those that are the closest to us that keeps us distant emmotionally? Why do we tend to make close ties with people we have never met before like in chat rooms and social connectors like facebook, but fail to do this with the ones we sit next to every day? I think it is really very simple. Every person wants to feel loved and accepted by someone. A face to face encounter puts us at a high risk of rejection. It's like fishing. If were to go out and bait a hook and cast it into the water the amount of time it would take me to catch something might be 45 minutes. And at the end of 45 minutes I would have one fish. Impressive right? Well lets say I took a bigger boat out and fished using a drag net. After 45 minutes I pull up the net and find that I have caught not just one fish but 385. What sounds more impressive, 1 or 385. Duh!!! So we network looking for the status that likely would elude us if we made friends the old school way. But what is lost? What are we giving up by saying it's ok to exist on the computer but not in the world? Is a sense of committment to friends a sacrifice? Is a loss of accountability diminishing? I watch kids text faster of their little flip phones than I can type on a keyboard the size of a countertop. But these same kids struggle to write a paper using correct english. No wonder people don't know how to act and behave in so many situations. No wonder it seems that there is a growing number of people who crave personal attention to the degree that they will committ crimes to get it. Lets get in their face and make it personal.