- April 26, 2024
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I spent time with friends last week, and I remember looking up from my phone to see my wife and her friend looking at their phones, and our friends’ daughter looking at her phone. Every now and then, there was some talk.
At home over the weekend, I bounced between trying to hook my tablet up to my TV, to checking the news on my phone. The inertia can be difficult to combat: I get in the habit of checking email and Facebook every few minutes, it seems, and it’s hard to stop because it’s sitting there in my hand.
Another friend lamented to me recently that he wished he could go back to the time when people called each other on their birthdays, rather than just texting. I agreed with him. And yet, I’ve done it, too. It’s easy to justify it in my head: If I call, it might inconvenience my brother. Texting is more courteous, in a way.
I was snapped out of these digital doldrums a couple of weeks ago by Brady Quinn, the quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, who spoke at a post-game press conference Dec. 2, a day after teammate Jovan Belcher murdered Kasandra M. Perkins and then took his own life.
“The one thing people can hopefully try to take away, I guess, is the relationships they have with people,” Quinn said. “I know when it happened, I was sitting and, in my head, thinking what I could have done differently. When you ask someone how they are doing, do you really mean it? When you answer someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth?
“We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and Facebook, and that’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships that we have right in front of us. Hopefully, people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing on a day-to-day basis.”
Belcher’s murder didn’t happen in a vacuum. He was apparently going through tough times, to say the least. Could Quinn or others have helped him? No one will ever know. But the lesson Quinn seemed to learn from the incident is that Facebook and text messages are not an adequate substitute for putting an arm around someone and looking him in the eyes.
This column, like most of my thoughts of late, is quietly winding its way to the mass shooting Dec. 14, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Although I grew up in Connecticut, I don’t know anyone involved in the incident, but like many of you, I have been shaken up by how personal it all still feels.
As I search for a way to respond to the shooting, I think again of Quinn’s words about relationships.
If anything positive can be taken from the tragedy, it’s that it has inspired people around the world to be a little more patient with their children, a little more likely to give their loved ones a physical embrace rather than an emoticon, and in my case, it made me close out of a text message to my brother on Dec. 15, and instead, call him to wish him a happy birthday.
