To the editor:

Thought for today:  The Internet and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates wipe out millions of jobs, newspapers, stores, malls, and they become the richest guys on the planet by making jobs and people (and our connections to each other and our shared humanity) obsolete while we gleefully rub our hands together and celebrate being able to get things 'cheaper' (in every way) and settle for 'virtual' connections and virtual humanity via 'smart' (gag!) phones, and read books on Kindle and become less and less human and connected (until we turn to drugs and booze and addictions to assuage our loneliness and end up, ironically, being 'reconnected' at AA and Al Anon and recovery houses  :-).

We make flimsy excuses like 'that's progress' and 'another door will open' and accept all this like blind sheep headed for the slaughter house while electing disgusting automatons and money grubbers and simpletons and petulant little boys with third grade maturity like Donald Trump to represent a nation of people that has now become soulless, homeless, and so disconnected and valueless that they don't even know anything is missing or wrong and accept it as some kind of perverted and twisted 'normal'.

They keep popping out kids (especially certain ethnic minorities) by the dozens like it's a game thinking that the American Dream is somehow still alive and they will 'go to college, get a good job, own a house, have a retirement, go to soccer practice, be treated fairly by the rich, and have turkey at Thanksgiving while burning billions of barrels of oil every year and peeing in their own water hole in a thousand ways as the 'haves' ,banded into corporations, buy off entire countries and governments, and ruin them in the name of profit and stock market 'gains'. When they find out there is no chance at all to succeed they become 'reconnected' in gangs and join the underground economy, kill people at will (after all, people have no value, right?) and end up in tents under the freeway or under the Lewis Street bridge.

So we throw zillions of dollars at the 'homeless problem' trying to rehabilitate and 'help' people who never had a 'home' inside their own skin in the first place due to all our 'advances' and 'progress'. (Yes, there are still 'good' people out there. Spare me the 'glass is half full' lecture.)

Let's hope that the 'bottom' we have hit, and are experiencing, leads so some kind of revival or Renaissance of 'humanity' and spirit. I'm not holding my breath.

Have a good one!

Robert Van den Akker

Seattle