All connected yet all alone

If you don't know who he is, (a) put down the bong, (b) crawl out from under your rock and (c) turn on a television.

First, he "landed" a plane in the middle of the Hudson River safely. Second, he walked the length of the plane not once but twice to make sure all of the passengers on this plane were out of harms way. Then he gave a drenched, shivering passenger his shirt in an effort to stave off hypothermia for the passenger. The man is a god.

On Friday morning when I got to work, listening to NPR, I heard there were eight Facebook groups dedicated to our man Sully. I logged on to FB as soon as I got to work and joined one of the groups, which at that point had 6,200 members. Mere moments ago, I went back and that group has swelled to 72,000 members. And reading the wall, I got to thinking about the way we share our experiences in the techno age.

In my grandparents' day, it was talk at the coffee shop or beauty parlor and you knew what you knew from the radio or the newspaper or the local gossip. News moved at a snail's pace, as we would see it now, but then the wireless mean a radio, not a phone, and to that generation, the news came at breakneck speed.

In my parents' generation, it was Walter Cronkite on the evening news and your choice of newspapers. The advent of television and the evening news changed how people saw the world but again, the delivery system would seem slow and bleak to us who are now use to color pictures, banners, scroll bars and catchy themes to our news coverage.

Now, in our generation, we have a community not only in the locality in which we live but in the cyber town halls. People are posting messages up on a Facebook wall to a man who will most likely never read them. Yet, post we must. In our technological world, this is the town square, the water cooler, the place we go to feel a part of something. We're all connected and yet, we're all alone. People reach out to and on FB to feel a connection. Even with friends and family, we still want to be part of something else.

I hope Sully gets his kids to sign him on and let him read the wall posts. As much as we all wrote on the wall to him, we were writing for each other and sending out our thoughts and prayers and energies to betterment of all.

Admit it. You couldn't help but feel the world is a better place today because of the actions of two pilots you'll never meet.