Airports have changed.  I used to travel extensively but it has been several years since I found the need to crawl on a plane and be hurled through the sky.  Today, with apologies to Ray Whitley and Gene Autry, I find myself “Back in Saddle Again.”

Things have changed around here.  There was a time before cell phones and laptops that people would actually have conversations in Airports and planes.  Little temporary communities would pop up in the boarding areas before flights.  Small talk was all about “where are you from?” and “where are you going?”   and “why?”  Eventually conversation would turn to jobs and family, children and church, friends and fun.  Grandparents would smile over kids they never met, mothers would meet and congregate with one another for moral support as they sought to travel with their young offspring.  People would talk.

Of course all of that was during a time before September 11, 2001.  I suspect a part of what has broken down the sense of community in airports is a sense of fear.  The necessity of greater security has raised the stress level in these places.  Long lines of shoeless people holding their belongings in plastic bins are not typically looking for companionship.  We just want the whole screening process behind us.

More than that, though, there is a sense in today’s airports that nobody is really present.  The teenager across the way from me is obviously talking to the boyfriend she just left or is heading to see on her cell phone.  One guy in a business suit behind me in this uncomfortable chair is discussing (at the top of his lungs, I might add) some kind of important thing that simply cannot wait and I simply cannot understand.  On my last flight, there was man next to me who, just before takeoff, used his cell phone to discuss his cancer treatment at MD Anderson with a friend. Several of these folks are sending and receiving text messages.

As I look around here, I am one of probably a dozen people who are working on a laptop.  I am blogging.  What are they up to?  To be honest, I ran a quick check of my Facebook account before I started this article.  While our bodies are all in this place, I am not sure any of us are really here.  There’s not a single person around me (myself included) that is not involved with some sort of modern technology.  Our bodies are all sharing in an experience of waiting for a flight.  We all have similar looking boarding passes.  We are all going somewhere.  We have something in common that could lead us to conversation and to community.  I miss the airport as it used to be.

How much of the rest of our lives do we spend doing this?  The world seems to be getting smaller in many ways.  I have friends all over the world with whom  I can communicate via Skype or Facebook, email or any number of “chat” options.  There are people who I have not even laid eyes on in 20 years with whom I can communicate at the drop of a mouse click.  Yet here I sit in a room full of warm bodies and none of us seem to be in communication with anyone else in the room at all.  This sea of faces are turned downward to the technology we hold.  I wonder what it would take to engage some of these people in conversation.  

I think I’ll go try.