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Editorials/Columns
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Your Soul For Sale!
erhaps, this editorial should’ve been written
twenty years ago. Back then, the warning that now consumes anyone who ever dared discount the dark side of Facebook, was still a sparkle in the eyes of folks like Mark Zuckerberg, who during those days dreamed of Nintendo and thought they owned the world.
During those days, the digital underground was in- deed a best kept secret while computers were the things that ran microwave ovens. True, certain enter- prising college professors flirted with George Orwell’s idea of a “Big Brother” government eavesdropping on every facet of human privacy. But such was only a Star Trek fantasy. Little did we know the fantasy and the joke was on us!
But little Mark Zuckerberg has now grown up to be- come CEO Mark Zuckerberg, head of the most invasive internet vehicle on earth.
And to our horror, we recently have discovered that there is nothing about us (physically, intellectually, or fiscally) that hasn’t already been discovered, thanks to over-ready computer geeks who make a habit of plac- ing their every hiccup on Facebook.
And so, here we are: ‘went to sleep free and woke up enslaved . . . our privacy is the world’s playground as we confuse nakedness with transparency.’
A funny thing happened to Mark Zuckerberg though, on his way to his umpteenth Facebook billion: he got religion and came down with a case of the con- science. “I’m sorry,” he said, “for selling your soul.” And we would love to believe him . . . But our battery died.
enseless tragedies, that
are the result of cold- blooded murder, are always hard to handle. And when the victims are innocent chil- dren it makes them even worse.
These incidents become especially difficult to com- prehend when the person re- sponsible for taking a child’s life is his or her own parent. The one individual in the world who’s least expected to commit such an atrocity.
Even though it’s far from uncommon these days for something so horrific to occur, whenever it does hap- pen, it always produces the same level of shock and con- fusion. An overwhelming feeling of disbelief that leaves everyone in the community asking one question.... Why?
That is the first thing that probably crossed everyone’s mind last week when the story emerged of 29-year-old Ronnie O’neal, III, killing
his daughter, the mother of his children and an attempt to kill his 9-year-old son in a fit of inexplicable rage. His actions so brutal that it was hard for those closest to him to wrap their heads around the idea that the person they knew could have become the kind of monster they thought only existed in horror novels.
And, unfortunately, them being dumbfounded is not unusual. I mean what would cause a man, whose friends say was completely normal a few days prior, to snap so vi- olently on the people he loved the most? Were drugs to blame? Religious fanati- cism? Something in the water? A mental breakdown? Government mind control? Demonic possession? A com- bination of all the above?
The fact that there never seems to be a neatly wrapped explanation for what causes an individual to engage in this type of madness, to me,
is the scariest part of these occurrences because it’s im- possible to come up with a solution to keep them from happening when the prob- lem is so unidentifiable. Without the ability to pin- point the underlining issue, we’re left to speculate and wonder if our own slightly off neighbor or eccentric relative is capable of doing the exact same thing?
Hopefully, what tran- spired in Riverview was an isolated case involving a man with an undiagnosed mental illness. But something in the back of my mind tells me that, with the number of sim- ilar episodes that have taken place across the country in recent years, we may be bearing witness to an omi- nous pattern taking shape that could be part of some- thing a whole lot deeper and inspired by something far more frightening than we could ever imagine.
Let’s pray that’s not the case.
Reality On Ice is © by the Florida Sentinel Bul- letin Publishing Com- pany. You can contact Mr. Barr at: cbar- ronice@gmail.com.
A Time To Fear
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