One of Zero Poem 9/30

My fiance calls people with those ear buds talking on their cell phones One of Zero.
It's a reference to The Borg, the villians on Star Trek who are interconnected with the Borg Collective.
No one is alone.  You are one of seven or one of twelve hundred.

So, One of Zero,
You look agitated, enlivened and a little cray-cray.
We often think you're talking to yourself.
It's not hand's free anymore if you have to reach up and touch it.
You're distracted whilst driving.
Even when you think you're being safe.
Even in the grocery store when you stop, middle of the aisle, suddenly
not realizing someone is behind you walking just as fast
and you don't move or get out of their way
but proceed with your conversation
full voice in the middle of the aisle
talking about what your opinion is
on the subject
we'd all rather not hear about.

When are we all going to have enough,
be connected enough,
be courageous enough to realize that our connectivity
is placing us in a state of perpetual change that leaves us
in a constant state of distraction and disconnection with the actual real world around us.

The living world is the one that breathes, moves, lives
and not on a page in the internet which technically doesn't exist.
On a phone even, where conversations are limited to screens
with scribblings of fragmented words shot back and forth
from a satellite to another phone somewhere else
where a face to face conversation about something real
might have prevented the ending of a friendship
over misunderstanding of what those
emoticons really meant.

We have been removed and therefore can remove
unfriend, unlike, post, send, wave, LOL
and give meaning to meaningless in the pursuit of
technological advance and the future
while piles of our discarded electronics are sent to
children in Cambodia to "recycle"
poisoning, maming, killing them
for us to become One of Zero.

Maybe we will all be One of Zero one day
when there is nothing left of the earth but poisoned oceans
and dead radioactive animals....
LOL