Holding Cells

Cell phones are meant to be tools that help, not constant addictive fetishes that hang on hands like festering malignant societal tumors. They have become an offensive nuisance and sometimes, a weapon. Put the things away! Please! The object is a phone, not your entire life. You really can live without it. At least for designated periods of time. To ride on public transportation, eat in a restaurant, enter a public building or just walk down the street one is exposed to one-armed people babbling into a little piece of plastic. Going shopping, entering a library or school, being in place of natural beauty, there are those who, addicted to their bits of electronic silliness may be asked to put the thing down and behave like a human being and not a slave to a piece of  battery battering plastic. But if you dare to do so, it is as though you have kidnapped their child. What? It's none of your business, they say indignantly. Well, sorry, it is my business when you make it mine. I don't want to hear you doing business or "taking this call " or checking on the kids you should be with in person,  or gabbing about endless inane nothings with your friends. I certainly don't want to hear you smooming with your boy or girl friend or clicking away texting while I am in your company. I have had it with parents who allow their children, in my presence, rudely to permit those things at the mealtime table or allow them to enter classrooms in schools when kids ought to be concentrating on an education that  the public dollar pays for.  The cell phone has gone way beyond its original purpose and we have let it become a prosthesis instead of an aid. When gym tights have pockets for them or backpacks and handbags, holders, it has gone far too far. It's not the tool that is at fault, it's the use of it that offends. The other day, a gentleman who sat at table with his grandsons, hoped to speak with them about an important matter that offered him only one opportunity in a long while to discuss something with the young teens. The parents sitting also at the table took no notice of the youngster never leaving his phone for a second. They, too, had their phones in hand. The grandparent had the good manners to keep his phone in his shirt pocket while being with family, but the other members of the group under the pretense of  a family get together, were thoughtlessly holding individual intermittent conversations with whomever was doing the same bit of uncouth activity at the other end. Now, I love my cell phone and use it for all sorts of purposes that I am happy with, but there is a limit to it. Like frying chicken or driving a car or jumping on a trampoline, you put the phone away.  When you sit with people, in a social situation, you hide these gizmos and do not say when they send out their obnoxious "cute" noises,  "I have to take this". You don't need to "take it".  You need to ignore it, if you hadn't the good decorum to turn the thing off in the first place. If you cannot do this, you are addicted and need help. Back off thinking you have to be in touch constantly with another abuser of human social life and interaction.  You can, with spinal determination, actually exist without a phone attached to your brain. Do it before you turn into one.