The Scourge of the Mobile

I had a really nice Easter weekend thanks for asking.

It might have been marred on Saturday however - nay my whole life could have been changed forever - when I narrowly avoided my first road accident in over 30 years. Only thanks to the fact that I still have decent reactions, I was not going at an excessive speed and my car did not skid, was a catastrophe averted.

And what was the cause? A young woman stepped off the pavement in front of me while staring at the small screen of her mobile phone. Making things potentially even worse was the fact that with her free hand she was manoeuvring a push chair containing her young child. So, as you can no doubt imagine, it would have been the innocent child who would have taken the main force of any collision.

I'm astounded that any parent would put their child in such danger but I am sad to say that this was not an isolated incident. There is scarcely a day that passes without me seeing such things occurring, though thankfully they don't usually require me to stamp on the brake peddle.

During a conversation with friends the other evening someone asked the question whether we would be happy to get into a computer driven car, something that appears to be on the very near horizon. I replied that personally I would feel happier to climb into such a car than one driven by one of the numerous idiots I see driving while clearly texting on their phones. At least the computer would, I assume, not be distracted by such things and would be fully focused on the task in hand.

The above incident made me wonder how children can survive the scourge of the mobile phone. Assuming that they do survive the early years of being pushed around by distracted parents, they then attend schools where all of their friends are permanently glued to their mobile phones and where, according to one article I read recently, every playground row is shared with friends via social media invariably resulting in "savagely cruel verbal attacks." The article concluded "we should weep at the damage being done to young minds and the gutlessness of grown-ups to do much about it." In my view, it is not just the gutlessness of adults; it is the fact that they are themselves setting such a terrible example. Every day without fail I see young children having to amuse themselves while their parents gaze blankly at the screens of their smartphones. Of course from about the age of eight the children will have their own mobile phones and then everything will be alright. Won't it?