It's not a particularly deep realization but it's wide-reaching, the degree to which as a culture and as individuals we continue to perfect the eternal non-present.
You could argue that what I should say is the multiply-or-diluted present but the net effect is a desensitization, not just to violence, in the foil packaging of a hamburger as opposed to killing the cow yourself, in drone planes that kill by remote control like in some really really advanced and demented video game. Not just to information, with ten browser windows open ten best internet friends and nothing fully parsed but much gleaned at instant summary distance. But to joy as well, in digitizing our photographs, our correspondence, a bulk of our human connection, and so on and therefore holding these things at an easily parsable, easily forgettable and never impactful distance.
So we've become a place of daydream revolutions, revolutions conceived as marketing campaigns or cute little clubs built on 1917 daydreams, lives and loves and fantasy football and once in a while the deluxe and illustrious mechanism breaks down to let real physics intrude, some kid takes a real helmet to helmet hit and ends up knocked immobile, frozen on the field, trying to move something to show he still can, and they bring in the golf cart, and if you concentrate really hard, you can will yourself to pretend it's a golf course, and the kid's just taking a nap on the way to the next hole.
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