Lately, I’ve become more a silent thinker than an outspoken writer. The reasons are not simple. They are complex. Which is why I’ve not written about them. I just could not envision how to explain what I was thinking about.

In today’s digital society, almost all business and other affairs end up being shared with one another not in human personal conversations on phone or in person, but by abbreviated emails and tweets and pictures and videos.

People don’t communicate anymore, sharing by voice in plain English the ideas and concepts inhabiting their minds. Rather, they use graphic symbols: like smiley faces and grimaces and frowns coupled with 125-lettered gobbledygook language.

Ours has become an age of goofy communication, forcibly sold to us by hidden digital gurus as maximum communication. It is essentially the con game of the century. If it is not disrupted somehow, it’s going to become the con game of the millennium, the norm for the next 1,000 years.

My premise, the basis for my argument, is that we have all become internally digitalized. Our thinking processes, just like wooden forests turned to fossilized stone, have become rigid, inflexible, hardened, deadened, numbed.

Stupefied. That’s the word I’m looking for. We’re all stunned. We’ve become  bewildered. Not completely. No. In the case of some issues, our activism and technology have saved us. We’ve pulled off some fascinating accomplishments.

‘The current verdict passed on policeman Derek Chauvin is an example. A 13-year old with a smartphone camera brought a man to court. However, that is another subject. That is the subject of Activism on the part of the public, which is the excellent consequence of the collaboration of the smart phone camera and human involvement.

I applaud this. This is one thing that brings human communication back into the social and political dialogue. Human activism, people getting into the streets and demonstrating peacefully, is probably the solution to the petrified digital phenomenon. It is a welcome positive from the more commonly stupefied norm. The un-peaceful demonstration against the Capitol was, of course, an aberration of peaceful human activism. It was the stepping over the line from civilized society to uncivilized mob-ism.

The subject I’m discussing, though, is purely the digitalized universe: the Internet. It is the Internet that has spawned, for instance, a multi-billion dollar confidence industry that is daily bilking Americans of our hard earned money.

I recently asked a U.S. Congressman if he would look into this digital Internet confidence industry. His staff answered it is a matter of “Privacy.” They allege the Internet requires privacy to protect everyone.

The problem is, that that permits Confidence people to operate with impunity on the Internet. That’s my issue. There has to be a means to bring the technology industry front and center in identifying legitimate citizens with legitimate business from the many outright crooks.

The solution may be complicated to develop. I just know that I have been totally stymied time and again trying to find the phone numbers of major corporations and of obvious confidence schemes and their operators. I am confident that many other Americans have faced the same issue.

This is the petrifaction, the stony silent secret digital wall, that helps keep us all from seriously communicating with one another, by virtue of a uniquely bizarre anonymity and confidentiality which clearly – if unintentionally – protects many very crafty thieves.

My congressman’s staff has informed me they will finally place my concerns on the congressman’s physical desk. If that really happens, I’ll let you know what follows. If at your advanced age you have become so pessimistic you don’t think this might eventually cause positive change, don’t forget our 13-year-old videographer.

She brought a pretty big, petrified norm down to its knees – without putting her knee on its neck.