Like Clockwork Orange

     When I was in 2nd grade I moved to a new city. Having lost all my old social connections I felt angry and lost. Although I had been fairly popular at my first school, I didn't make a good first impression at this new elementary and struggled to form the same prosocial connections again. I sank into a more reclusive personality.     Everyone deals with bullies at some point, and while it was never really something that plagued me, I do recall once instance where a bully accused me of harming his younger brother in some way. I had no idea who either individual was, but being confronted by this larger opponent and not wanting to be blamed and have to reap whatever punishment that was coming for me, I decided to lie my way out. The exchange went something like this:          "I heard you were the one that hurt by little brother!"                      "Uh no, it was that other guy that looks like me..."          "Oh...which guy?"                    &qu

     Whenever I drive into the "whiter" and more evangelical parts of Orange County, where absolutely not one liquor store exists and the only wine for miles is locked behind chapel doors, I always feel confined by a moralizing authority that simply seems excessively fraudulent . I'm talking of course about Yorba Linda. Everything here is nicer, and richer, and much more conservative - after all who wouldn't want to conserve all this goodness once obtained?      Recently, I was picking up someone slightly more than a friend - who herself was staying at a friends house - and I arrived to an obscenely large estate marked by an equally large flagpole. Curiously, it was the only flagpole on the block. It happens that in my own more diverse neighborhood there is a similarly conspicuous flag pole that waves daily either touting "Trump", Beer themes, POW, or baseball paraphernalia. This being my only point of reference, I make a quick blanket assumption that thes

Developmentally, a child accidentally touching the stove is often used as an example of how the strength of a stimulus trains us to avoid or return to a behavior. As the saying goes, “He who plays with fire gets burned.” But maybe old adages are faulty guides because plenty of people can play with fire and come out the other end unscathed. Perhaps the question then is how ‘He who played with fire’ got burned. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing. Like Prometheus bestowing the gift of fire upon a child, the child cannot rightly be expected to know what to do – or more crucially, what not to do. Reliably, initially he will get burned. But overtime, that same child has learned to wield fire and has now entered a technological age where he believes his talents at controlling Prometheus’ first gift also make him adept at wielding his latest [digital] contribution into the lives of humans. Unfortunately, like the proverbial child, we are being burned by our new social technologies, exce