Not long ago, while visiting the Long Barracks Museum at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, we came across this statue. It’s not a big statue, only 18 inches high or so, and displayed in a clear plastic box. There are other statues of a similar size throughout the short tour of the Long Barracks. This one depicts a padre—a priest or clergyman of some sort (we didn’t get his name) from the long-ago days before the Alamo became the Alamo and was known as the Mission San Antonio de Valero.
What intrigues me about the statue is that it proves beyond doubt that history repeats itself; that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Because what the statue clearly depicts is a padre with his handheld digital device. And he is doing, way back then, the same kind of thing you see happening everywhere, all the time, today.
Maybe he is engaged in a phone call on speaker. Perhaps he is sending (or reading) a text message. It could be that he is using the camera function to take a photograph—maybe even a selfie.
Could he have gotten an alert on one of his social media platforms? Is he responding to something on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or the wreck formerly known as Twitter?
Since he is some kind of Catholic clergyman, it is probably a safe bet that he is not perusing a dating site or matchmaking service. I suppose he could be checking the weather forecast. Or he might be watching cute cat videos on YouTube.
By way of
full disclosure, I don’t have any kind of handheld digital device myself, so
this is only totally ignorant, wholly uninformed speculation on my part.