The hurrier we go the behinder we get

If life gets any instanter than it is right now, we're going to start meeting ourselves on the way to our various destinations.

We hold the power button in our hand and with it we can change the TV channel, presto-changeo.

We have the mircrowave oven that cooks up the main dinner course in a jiffy and the SST superjets that get you from Paris to New York before you can finish your dessert.

It seems like we are in such a hurry and fly in such a tight circle that we, like the Wongi-Wongi bird, are apt to disappear at any moment in a flurry of feathers.

With each new hurry-up device approved at the patent office the size of this old planet gets smaller and smaller.

Looks like the world is undergoing a time-saving revolution, and going through an incredible shrinking process while the people in it seem to be growing farther and farther apart.

What with the proposed reinvention of government proposals going through their machinations and the pell-mell drive toward uniworldism, we are beginning to question whether or not we are the sens-ible or the sense-less generation.

Nations are overlapping their boundaries and melting down at such a pace that the map has to be redrawn or altered from one minute to the next.

Now, a lot of folks say that the &uot;good old days&uot; were not good, that they qualify only as old and of no value.

Most of those folks never lived through the pre-ulcer days when life was lived at a leisurely pace and with a certain amount of freedom from time-consuming duties, responsibilities and activities.

It is with delight and an ill-concealed smirk of smugness that this ancient retiree looks askance and with a touch of malicious pleasure at those younguns who'll be sitting someday in the catbird seat.

I certainly hope you all thrive and survive to reach the stage in life when you can reflect on some of the foibles that beset the now generation.

Since we are getting instanter and instanter in all our goings-on, maybe it would be a good idea to know what our destination is before we get started, because the hurrier we go the behinder we get.

It 's with a heavy heart that I report what follows.

Tom Johnson, perhaps the greatest editorialist of our time, has passed away at what I consider a tender age, 72.

Tom and I shared the workload at The Montgomery Advertiser some four decades ago.

He authored the &uot;Tell it not on the streets of Askelon&uot; series, while I tended the reportorial staff - covering all the facets of the city, and popping the whip on some 10 to 12 reporters.

Tom's contributions to newspaperdom were immeasurable, and as Bobby Burns likely would say &uot;those words he inscribed will not soon be forgot, but e'er be brought to mind.&uot;

He purchased the Montgomery Independent (a weekly Montgomery newspaper) in 1965 and regaled his readers with timeless, even-handed writings that defy imitation.

Tom is gone now, leaving a rich and tremendous heritage.

RIP