Aware and Ignorant by William Moyers on Creators.com

Recently

Whitney's Legacy Had she lived, Whitney Houston would have been in the second-to-last "class" of baby boomers turning 50 years old. Her death underscores a dangerous dynamic facing this generation as it enters older age. About 77 million Americans were …Read more. Stealth Bomber Sometimes it is the immediacy of the moment's emotions that demands this space, and that's what spills forth right now. The best I can do is just lay it out; if I think too hard, I'll bury it in a neat and tidy column, and you won't know what I'm …Read more. Vigilance: A Mouthful Suddenly, I'm enamored with going to the dentist. I even welcome his prying at my teeth and poking into my gums, which need repair. Bring it on, I say. Except when he's got his tools in my mouth propped wide-open. Then I utter nothing. My new …Read more. My Hero Mel, Twice It's not often any of us can claim one hero twice in our lives, and for different reasons. In my life, that's Mel Schulstad. He died this month. He was 93. This past week, I had the honor of offering a eulogy at his memorial service in Everett, Wash.…Read more.

Aware and Ignorant

Nothing else I've written this past year has garnered reader response like my column on my unhealthy dependence on a BlackBerry. And for once, nobody disagreed with my perspective. Our society has become addicted to mobile devices and what they do for us and to us.

I got dozens of e-mails and text messages (via my BlackBerry) from people, mostly parents. I even got one from my boss. Of all the feedback, nothing resonated like this experience shared by my friend whose eighth-grade daughter goes to school with my children in St. Paul, Minn. She wrote: "Your 'Crackberry' article was well timed. We are all trying to wrestle this demon to the ground in the lives of our kids, if not our own. My daughter had forgotten her phone charger at a friend's house last weekend and was without it for several days. At first she was really anxious when she realized her phone would be dead for days and she would be out of the loop. A couple of days into it I realized we have old phones lying around in junk drawers, and I told her to put her (memory) card into one of those and use it. But a few days without the phone had given her a new experience of 'being' without the monkey on her back of being connected to the phone. When I offered an old phone to her again, she said quietly, 'No thanks, Mom. It has actually been a real relief not having it for a few days. Kind of like a vacation.' I was so amazed and saddened by her answer. We give these phones to our kids because they crave them and find them so necessary. But inadvertently we are consigning them to much of the stress that adults feel by being accessible to EVERYONE, ALL THE TIME! I think it may be time to rethink this for everyone!"

I felt an odd sense of relief in her perspective; in more ways than one, I'm not alone.

It's a daily challenge to detach from my BlackBerry. It's even tougher to know where to draw the line with my three teenagers and their cell phones. Like all parents, I want them to stay connected to me, and a simple land line isn't a viable option anymore, even though I ponder how my parents pulled it off when I was growing up in the 1970s. Their unwavering rule was that I call them if I was going to be late after a date with my girlfriend or making plans on the fly with my friends. And so I did, from a pay phone, I think.

Today's mobile media make it easier for kids to let us know when they are running late after school or stuck in an airport in a snowstorm. From the parking lot at school, they can share the immediate thrill of a good grade on an exam or reach out to a sick grandparent in a big-city hospital from the remoteness of a campground in the middle of nowhere. By voice, text or e-mail, today's pay phone conveniently is attached to our belts or tucked in our purses or, worse, worn in our ears.

In this space each week, I usually write about issues related to addiction to alcohol or other drugs. Sometimes I successfully can pull off a column like last week's about being hooked on my BlackBerry. But I realized that in the last line of her e-mail, my friend — the mother of the eighth-grader — had helped to drive home a point that I always am striving to make about addiction: "I think it may be time to rethink this for everyone!"

What if we substituted "alcoholism" for "iPhone" and "drug addiction" for "BlackBerry"? Maybe then our communities finally would pay attention and come up with a solution for our biggest problem of all.

William Moyers is the vice president of foundation relations for the Hazelden Foundation and the author of "Broken," his best-selling memoirs, and "A New Day, A New Life." Please send your questions to William Moyers at wmoyers@hazelden.org. To find out more about William Moyers and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.