It happens most every day at Ground Zero. The same scene is reenacted with the same exact dialog. A new customer walks into the store. I always take a moment to look up from whatever I am doing and greet them: "Hi, how're you doing?" I'll say. This can be roughly translated into normal English as "Hi, My name is David. I'm glad that you're in my store because I really need your money." To this they reply without even looking my direction: "Just looking." This can be roughly translated into normal English as "Back off and leave me alone!"

Usually at that point I just smile and resist the urge to say something pithy, which as anyone who knows me can tell you, requires a great deal of effort on my part. Now, we have a fairly set policy here at Ground Zero: When someone walks in the door, we greet them, our feeling being that everyone deserves the acknowledgment of their presence. After a quick greeting, we leave them alone, at least until they have made a complete circle around the store or stand with that bewildered look of someone who is lost. At that point we ask if there is anything that we can help them find. I tell anyone who works here that everyone wants to be acknowledged, but very few will tolerate being immediately hit with a sales pitch. But what about the people who bristle at the very greeting itself? Is human contact so annoying to them that they feel the need to stop it before it can even start? At what point did simple civility become a trait that surprisingly few people in our society seem to possess?

I think that the cause of this attitude can be directly linked to the speed at which our society operates. We are easily the fastest paced culture that has ever existed on this planet. We eat our Pop Tarts for breakfast and then rush to our jobs or schools, where we rush through our tasks in an effort to accomplish more than we did the day before. We shop at Supercenters so that we can get all our shopping done in one place, rather than lose any time driving to a different shopping place. We buy our groceries and toiletries while the oil is being changed on our car and the little ones are having their eyes examined. As a result we wind up patronizing large superstores where we do not know anyone and no one knows our name. Then we rush home where we lock our doors and wonder who the neighbors are. We pop some dinner in the microwave and turn some instant entertainment on the TV. Is it any wonder that our society seems to be losing the skill to interact with each other.

Then, just when we thought that our modern world couldn't get any less alienated and impersonal, along came the internet. Now, we no longer even need to get out of the house and brave hoards of unfamiliar people to shop for those important necessities. While there are a number of benefits to be gained from the internet, there is also a tremendous cost that we are paying right now. Not only are we becoming socially stunted, we are also becoming a generation of instant gratification junkies.

There was a lot of talk a couple of decades ago about how our nation was turning into a "disposable society." Item's were being manufactured in cheap plastic and were designed with built in obscelesence. Marriages were considered disposable and dissolved at the first sign of difficulty. People moved frequently which led to disposable neighborhoods where people seldom had time to know each other. Now decades later, we are the generation that was raised almost completely within that disposable culture. It molded a generation that has a difficult time assigning value. We saw this in the skewed values of the 80's, and we're seeing it in our children who collect Yu-Gi-Oh cards for some perceived monetary value in an attempt to build a junior stock portfolio when they should be enjoying their childhood. As we are pounded with the "throw it away" message, we lose the ability and desire to invest time or effort into the preservation or construction of anything. This conflicts with some basic human needs to build security and so we inevitably replace it with something else.

There is little doubt that we are now in the middle of a retail revolution. While we weren't paying attention the science fiction world of the Jetson's slipped ever closer to our reality. Perhaps the old model of making a trip to a physical destination to purchase tangible goods is one that will soon seem as outdated as buying pots and pans off of a wagon train. Or perhaps it won't. Like most scenarios where you actually get what you wished for, some people are finding that the old models that are disappearing actually had more value than anyone realized. Unfortunately it may be too late to save what we need from the past and allow it to adapt for the future.

So now the old survival skills of civility and courtesy have been replaced by the ability to manipulate Windows and navigate the web. People speak in shorthand code in virtual chatrooms and forget how to read facial expressions. Perhaps all of this is simply inevitable progress and it is only the dinosaurs who resist the change. But I remember a number of years ago when my grandmother had passed away. Sitting at her house before the funeral, I was struck by all of the people that were there. These were people that I had known for 20 years, as they had always seemed to be visiting my grandmother for one reason or another. In most cases, she had known them for 20, 30 or even 40 years before that. There was a sense of community represented in that house that was not the least bit "disposable". The alienation and isolation that exists all too often these days would have puzzled and saddened her. Frankly, she probably wouldn't have seen the point of the internet, either.

In this age of virtual entertainment, downloadable music and instant access to information, will we be forced to sacrifice the simpler pleasures of human interaction? I would have to think that we will not, as I see it as a basic human need. However the methods by which we interact and the skills that we employ are obviously changing. If we are to survive as social beings, however, then the direction that we are headed must change. Otherwise we may wake up to find ourselves incompatible with the world around us. Then we will find that we are able to do nothing more than "just look."