One of the most famous scenes in cinema is the one from Casablanca with Rick and Ilsa on the tarmac, the plane in the background, and fog enveloping the airport. She (Ingrid Bergman) has to leave but doesn’t want to. He (Humphrey Bogart) is in love with her but realizes he has to make her go. Ultimately she joins her husband and flies away. Woody Allen parodied the scene in Play It Again, Sam and probably made it more famous as a result.

Screenwriters Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard E. Koch had a pile of brilliant lines in Casablanca. But my favorite is when Rick tells Ilsa (and all of us of course):

. . . it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

I find this nugget of wisdom to be of great help in troubled times.

And these are troubled times. A demented fascist and his brain-dead minions are destroying our country. The engines of our wealth and prosperity are cooking us. Literally. And the most important of all human endeavors turns out to be advertising. It’s not what you do that counts. It’s how you spin it. Our citizenry has been taken over by this mind-set. If it looks OK on TV it must be OK.

The Information Age has unfortunately turned our minds into plows that can run for a mile but only cut an inch deep. It’s all surface. We touch plastic keypads and see dancing liquid crystals and think we are doing something. But we forget everything after we step away because it’s mostly just noise. The signal was re-packaged so long ago we don’t remember if we wanted it in the first place.

The Chinese used paper two thousand years ago. The Egyptians used pen-and-ink. The walls at Monte Alban are not only centuries older than the Berlin Wall—they are still standing. Some things are robust and some are not.

Greek bards knew the whole of the Odyssey in their heads. Religious scholars have committed to memory entire sets of scriptures: the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud all have centuries-long oral traditions. Will e-readers last that long? Or websites?

Anything with the enormous energy appetite of our computer-enhanced existence is bound to be vulnerable. Fragile. Unable to withstand shocks to the system. Fortunately we have backups. Our books. Our languages. Our music. Our art. Our minds. All the people we know. All the people we love. All the things we’ve built. All the stuff we’ve learned. Civilizations thrived long before digital connectivity.

Lest you think me a Luddite, I assure you I’m not. Advancements in technology are crucial. But wholesale surrender to our Silicon Valley Tech Bro Overlords is not advancement. Most of what they have to sell us is shit we don’t need. And in fact, it’s shit that’s mostly bad for us.

This brings me back to the “hill of beans.” The actions of individuals get absorbed into the morass of humanity and we lose our sense of identity and purpose. We feel nameless and hopeless and without agency in the world. But then we get up and keep going. Rick and Ilsa kept going! We will, too.

A few months ago I started a little project called EUMENTICS™. It was a bit of a parody of the self-help crowd. But it was a bit serious, too. I actually follow my own suggestions! I finally came up with the last one.

Lesson Eight: divest thyself of social media.

Personally, I’m quitting Facebook. Or ZuckLand, as I like to call it. He (Zuckerberg) is a piece-of-shit human being. And his clownish “vision” of the future is a mercantilist dystopia. Fuck him. I realize I’m just a “hill of beans” in their trillion-dollar universe, but it’s MY hill of beans.

I feel better already!

p.s. I will stop cross-posting HCN to ZuckLand. You can stay in touch with my writing by bookmarking this site (https://markcoconnor.com/) on your web browser. Or enter your email address in the box on the upper right of the web page. You can also email me directly (mcoc13@gmail.com) and I will add you to the notification list.