An interesting word “tethered” a word synonymous with hooked, lashed, tied, or chained to.
We can look around us and see this word or it’s meaning a very big part of our lives.
It can be likened to an umbilical cord as we were tethered to our moms before birth. Later we’re asked to cut the apron strings. We leave the nest and sometimes cut ties with family.
But we really can’t since, there is always an invisible connection.
In the grade school playground was a game called “Tetherball.”
It had a 10ft pole with a metal ring on top of it. To this was tied a cord of about 7ft in length. The cord is attached to a hard rubber ball sort of like a soccer ball. The ball has a place where the cord was attached to it. The game required two players who hit the ball back and forth trying to get the cord wrapped around the pole before the other player could.
Our lives like the ball are tied to a central pole or if you will a point. Whether through the family lineage or history we have a beginning and an end.
The internet is another of those links we have to other people and things.
How we use it is important because it can become too intrusive in our lives. I see people with their faces glued to a little screen, fingers moving rapidly over it.
As I am in writing this but my sixty-five-year-old fingers don’t move as rapidly!
What is written just like the “Tetherball” can wrap us around an idea whether it’s good or bad.
Indians-indigenous whatever are without excuse too as it has invaded their lives. Movies use to show us communicating with each other by using drum beats, smoke signals, and then mirrors as we acquired technical expertise.
The animal and bird calls that we use to do by making them with our voices are now included in the phone apps. As the comedian Yakov Smirnoff used to say “what a country” yes “what an app!”
Natives are Tethered to the land and so are those who were born here. So now we have a common ground. Yet we are still separate. Will we ever be able to say together “what a country we live in?” Will we become “one nation under God?”
Right now, it seems like we are many nations disgruntled all disgruntled and oppressed.
“Are we going to be tethered to hate?”