Can You See Me Now?

Last month I heard a news story where a school district plans to either finger print children, or hang a bar coded tag from a lanyard around their necks.  This so that as they enter and exit the bus - they can scan themselves or their assigned bar code and the driver is alerted if it's the wrong stop.

When did we stop looking at children as people and start believing it was better to "process" them like bar coded products on a delivery truck?  Why is it considered "realistic" to accept that their driver won't pay attention to the little person walking right past them and off the bus?  Since when did apathy and laziness cross from unacceptable to inevitable.

Have we become so emotionally detached from other human beings in our daily lives that we only see the efficiency in this and are oblivious of how a child must feel to just slide his card past a digital product to get off the bus?  It must be very lonely to be a child today.

We really need to reconnect with community - the community with arms and legs, toothless smiles and button noses.  The Like buttons and Tweets are tools training us to be less engaged with real people.

How often do we ignore a real person in order to look at our phone?  How often do we ignore our kids to see what someone "more important" or "more interesting" is doing on Facebook?  What if we reverted to that time when that was considered rude?  What if we actually paid attention to the people around us, instead of the status updates by our third cousin's funny friend in that digital device?

What crimes could we prevent, what value could we bestow upon our kids if we just lifted our eyes out of the palm of our hand and looked at real people more often?