Try reconnecting for Christmas season

Thanksgiving is over and Christmas is underway.

In our house, the colorful lights, tree and brightly wrapped boxes of gifts do not come out of closets until the day after Thanksgiving.

We started Christmas gift shopping long before and will continue through December. But during the post-Thanksgiving weekend we avoided the "Black Friday" crowds by watching movies at home.

One of the films was "Wall-E." It was a beautiful Pixar animated film with lots of laughs, along with a dump truck load of environmental message. No worries. It was still worth seeing.

But one message led to a lengthy post-viewing discussion about how the animators captured the issue with their satirical prediction. We ended agreeing they may have been completely correct with a portion of our society already engaged in this frightening behavior.

Litter? Nope. Large food portions leading to a race of super fatties? Wrong again. Pollution? Nah. Technology enabling lazy people? Close.

It was cellphones.

The movie portrayed humans as always talking to each other through a view screen (a metaphor for cellphones) without actually interacting to anyone in person. They zipped around each other in hover chairs (Matthew Weaver should be envious.) while constantly making small talk to people on their screens.

When two people have the screens disabled, it leaves them confused. Unsure of how to proceed in life. They marvel at their surroundings, regardless of how it was there all along and find it difficult to start conversing with each other in person.

Sound familiar?

Our love of the cellphone is pretty apparent. We had to make a law to stop people from using one in their hand while driving and to stop them from text messaging while guiding 2,000-pound motorized missiles on the road. Nearly every human being on Earth seems to have a cellphone.

A small percentage use them only in emergencies - not emergencies regarding groceries, movie rentals or the always critically important, "What's up?"

An even smaller percentage do not have them. They reportedly find living without them not only possible, but preferable.

I fall in line with the majority. I have one. It can take calls, text messages, e-mail, as well as take photographs, browse the Internet, play games, act as a calendar, and playback MP3s and video. It probably could feed my cat if I bothered to read the manual.

The movie reminded me of a great reason to live in Moses Lake. People.

While I Christmas shop, buy groceries or do anything requiring me to wait in line, I like to talk to the people around me. Most of them enjoy pleasant conversation and jokes with a stranger to pass time. Some hear my voice and start punching buttons on their cellphones or the ear pieces for their cellphones.

I like to do it to make someone else's day. There are more than enough people complaining about anything and everything. I seem to shock people when I pay them a compliment or commiserate about some trivial aspect of waiting in line.

There are also times when it is nice to point out happy scenes or warn someone when an item is about to plunge to the floor from the shopping cart.

It can be amazing what we miss when we are on the phone. But you need to be off the phone to notice.

I offer a method to make our Christmas shopping better in the Columbia Basin. Talk to the people in line. Make someone else's day. Tell the friend, who is obsessively concerned with what is up, where your are or what your are doing, to hang up and find something else to do.

I am not taking the extreme approach of proposing banishment of cellphones, but I am asking some people to reconnect with humans this Christmas season. Not every phone conversation is truly worth the time you could have spent making new friends or cheering up strangers.

I will continue being "that guy," the one who talks to strangers without every dialing a wrong number. I will continue my enjoyment of attempting to improve on Christmas by connecting with people who appreciate a kind word.

Bill Stevenson is the Columbia Basin Herald managing editor. His staff often find him a bit old fashioned, but meaning well.