There used to be real causes to fight for. Civil rights. Equal rights for women. Lowering the drinking age back to 18. Causes that touch and affect everyone, pushing the government to make sensible policies about the American public. And then something happened. Everyone started to be polite to everyone (even as they cursed them indoors out of the unblinking eye of public sentiment) and decided that protesting and holding signs and inducing the passing cars to honk in support was a relic of the past.

I've never actually been part of a protest, but I've seen them. I remember that the day we were to start bombing Iraq back in 1991, a few people stood up on something tall near the SUB and stripped--the protest wasn't specific to the bombing of Iraq, it was actually about getting their picture taken by the campus paper and getting on the front page naked. It's not real important, but it is something to believe in. Or at least a reaction to the fully clothed status quo, even if it's not related to anything at all.

Grown up baby boomers with too much time on their hands and groups nicknamed "Cell Phone Rights Now!" are up in arms over the looming change in area codes for Albuquerque and Santa Fe. We've known this was coming for some time. But until a month or so ago, all of us in the two biggest cities in New Mexico thought we'd keep the old 505 code and the rest of the state would have to remember the new one. We would only have to worry if, for some reason, we had to call Las Cruces or Clovis (yeah, right). But, in a surreal twist of fate, the legislature in Santa Fe passed a resolution (or something like it) that delegated the new area code to the people of Santa Fe and Albuquerque (and, presumably, those in Rio Rancho and the surrounding suburban hamlets as well).

Hell hath seen no fury like a cell phone owner scorned.

I've never seen so much stupid bitching from a bunch of people who should know better. The people in Los Angeles have to get new area codes every few months or so, but the people of New Mexico--particularly those in our biggest cities--seem to think we are immune to this problem. People have two or three home lines (talk, fax, Internet), a cell phone for every member of the family and pagers for their dogs and they wonder where all the available phone numbers have gone.

Considering that cars are rolling out with built in cell phones and Internet connections (not to mention On Star, which is also a phone-based service), I think people need to take a step back, pull in a good amount of New Mexico's mostly clean air and shut up.

The new area code for Albuquerque and Santa Fe will be 957. A commission (I'd like to get the money for this job) was set up to chose a new area code and that's the one they picked. End of story, get over it.

I've heard all the arguments. What about all the businesses that will have to alert their customers, change their websites, business cards and Rolodexes? What about people who can't remember three new numbers because their brains are full? And what about the cachet of having an area code rooted in the beautiful past when no area code had a number other than zero or one as the second number?

This is something the people of Albuquerque and Santa Fe should have thought about when they started to gobble up phone numbers like Thanksgiving turkey. If we didn't feel the need to be connected 110% of the time we are alive, this wouldn't be a problem. But everyone needs to be accessible to telemarketers all the time, so everyone got things to attach to their belts or heads or fanny packs.

I could go into the obscene nature of cell phones (the need of cell phone owners to talk to someone in the ether while the person they were actually talking to personally waits patiently and hears a bizarre half conversation about how they're not really doing anything important so what's going on there? nothing? not much here either...), but I'll keep it short and sweet in the interest of those reading this column on their cell phone LCD screen.

GET OVER IT.

You wanted the future, here it is. It's called a new area code so we can all have the most connectivity we can stand with the rest of the world.

And if you want some kind of mental clue about how to remember this new, baffling area code (Three new numbers? My brain is gonna bust!), here it is: watch the Kids In The Hall movie Brain Candy. A pivotal character is called Mrs. Hurticure. The scientists who are testing their new anti-depression drug dub Mrs. Hurticure "Patient 957" in the efficient nature of scientific testing. Patient 957 is repeated many times in the flick. By the time you are finished watching, it will be implanted on your brain. If it doesn't take after one viewing, please rewind and repeat. It's a funny movie, so it's not like you're watching medical procedures for an hour and a half.

And then, after this very cheap and amusing therapy, put all your stupid signs down, shut the hell up and get over it. You'll have to call all those people who call you and must talk to you--while I'm holding your beer and wondering why I'm suddenly a second class citizen in your eyes--and tell them: Now it's 957, not 505.

Matt Worley has enough trouble connecting with the cute drummer of the Hopefuls to worry about connecting with the rest of world through a cell phone.