Exiting Wisdom

By Lynn Ockersz

If you are blighting your youth,

By hunching over a computer screen,

And in the process losing your virility,

O young people of the Nodding Isle,

Then, I cannot blame you wholesale,

For your effusive rulers’ minds,

Are fixated on a digitalized state,

To the exclusion of all else,

And they harangue you no end,

That there’s no future for you,

Outside an ICT education strait-jacket,

But pause awhile and think on this gem,

Coming off the pen of the great T.S. Eliot:

‘Where’s the wisdom that’s lost in knowledge?’

‘Where’s the Knowledge that’s lost in information?’

Tell your rulers, then, that you need an erudition,

Where the arts will balance the sciences;

Tell them you do not want to be in league,

With the One-Dimensional Hollow Man,

Of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution.