Life Before the Internet

Before the Internet I never saw really fat people. I'm talking really fat people -- the grotesque ones who can barely move. Now photographs of them spring up in my face without warning, alarming and disgusting me, while "woke" people comment about the horrors of fat-shaming and how they are beautiful just as they are, which lets me know that besides the morbidly obese there are the morbidly insane or, at the very least, the morbidly misguided.

Before the Internet I wouldn't have known that many Americans, certainly half of them, don't consider Kamala Harris and Joe Biden to be nincompoops. I also would never have heard a lot of the dumb things those two say, as the newspapers and TV new shows clean that stuff up. Sadly, now I know that our VP is an idiot who really loves yellow school buses and POTUS is markedly feeble-minded. 

Before the Internet many of the people presently deceased would be alive instead of having fallen to their deaths while taking mountaintop selfies in order to post them online. In the old days there were no selfies; the word didn't even exist. Instead photos of us were taken by others and seen only by people we knew personally.

Before the Internet, total strangers we will never meet including many who live far away, sometimes in other countries, would never gain access to our home addresses, our phone numbers, our ages, the names and ages and addresses of our spouses and children and entire families, as well as where we work, where we have worked in the past and what other people may think of us.

Before the Internet, we took our chances when we went out to dinner and expected the best instead of knowing the worst about every restaurant, cafe, ice cream shop and pizza parlor. We had our cars serviced and teeth cleaned and heads examined by people our friends told us were good at it, and shopped at establishments nearby or those that were highly praised by friends and family. 

Life was better then.