Can We Rise and Shine?

Professor J,

You make a good, yet somewhat depressing, point (your forte! ;)) about the rescuers of the motorcyclist. Another indication of our shortened attention spans and short sighted vision. We see glimpses of hope but as you indicate they are disconnected and short lived. Hoping to extend it long enough to make any real difference in the culture may be like Elvis asking "Why Can't Everyday Be Like Christmas?"

"They live in the eternal present." Think how popular this kind of thinking has become over the last few years. How many times have we heard "Live in the moment" repeated by talk show hosts and pop psychologists? While in a spiritual context it is beneficial (when balanced with recognizing that we are momentary inhabitors of a section of history and that our actions have consequences), it has become the clarion call of a people who have no historical framework through which to view current events  and no concern for the future and little for our descendants. A case could even be made that as more people decide not to have children for a variety of reasons, the link to the future and cause to be concerned about it is lessened still more. All that matters is right here, right now. This is the demanding self-centered thinking of a small child.  We are perpetually selling our birthright of freedom, literacy, and critical thinking for the cultural stew of celebrity worship, entertainment, and fleeting amusements.

I'd add to all the obstacles to finding solutions for our current predicament that you've named,  a certain mindlessness that we are all familiar with. We click links from one site to another and realize an hour later we have read nothing substantial. We eat mindlessly in front of the television, numbing ourselves with food paying no attention to the quantity we are eating (or watching) until we reach the bottom of an empty bag. Any mother will be familiar with looking around the room where she's been watching cartoons only to realize that her  children left at some point to find something more interesting to do. While I would say that the "Live in the moment" mantra, which gives little thought to how our current actions may affect a rapidly approaching future, is dangerous, I would say that learning to be conscious in the moment might be quite enlightening.  We cannot get a hold of the culture until we get a hold of ourselves. Lots of shaking will be necessary.

The literacy statistics found in this book and elsewhere are staggering. We've lost more than our ability to read and understand complex written material. We have lost our ability to think. We take in information, filtered by our already strongly held premises, and fortify our strongholds of illusion. We choose our friends, news channels, and reading material, on the basis of whether or not we can remained unchallenged in our positions. We brush away conflicting views, and become angry instead of curious when a contrary opinion is presented. Are our beliefs so fragile and ill thought out that we cannot bear discussion? We let our emotions rule our thought process and become reactive instead of reflective. The new illiteracy is worse than not being able to read a paper or decipher a lease; we have lost the ability to understand the predicament we are in. We know if we cannot read a street sign and know that we should be embarrassed, but we may not recognize at all that we have lost our ability to comprehend.  We can easily find legions of other non-understanders to comfort us in our shallow thinking. Truly challenging problems seem to be increasingly framed in ever simplistic terms as Hedges points out. When all else fails the conspiracy theorists allow us to feel superior in our delusions since everyone else cannot see what is so obvious. What they have, oh-so-cleverly, figured out. Any serious issues or inconsistencies are simply swept away with "That's just what they want you to think." Reason is rendered useless.

You are correct when you say "We have given ourselves passes on too much." We are living in the land of irresponsibility. An endless childhood ("induced childishness"). Think of how many adults you have heard say something about how they don't want to grow up, and adolescence now seems to last until thirty. Hedges quotes Marc Cooper's book, The Last Honest Place in America:


"In a television-marinated society in which the boundaries between childhood and adulthood have been blurred if not erased, increasingly and dismayingly, children and adults dress the same, eat the same, and often talk the same, where they certainly endlessly watch the same TV shows, where simulation is often valued over authenticity (look no further than the acrobatic contrivances of so-called "reality TV" or the reclassification of steel and concrete hotels into "scenery"), it should come as little surprise that the phony lava eruption and the staged pirate-show next door should bring equal glee to the ten-year olds and their parents. Add to that a certain solace Americans find in the worship of technology, even technology at this infantle level, and the Strip begins to make sense." (pp. 65-66)


In the article by Ellen Gray of the Philadelphia Enquirer about the new fall TV lineup she points out that a couple of new shows like Pan Am and The Playboy Club are "set in the 'Mad Men' era of the early 1960s." Her article is gender related; she ends it with this: "Maybe TV, worried as the rest of us about staying employed, grows wistful for a world in which men are men and women are, well, girls."
Perhaps not only are we missing what was good about those days in male/female relationships (appropriate masculinity/femininity got thrown out with the bathwater of inequality), but we are missing that adults were adults and children were children. Mothers used to wear high heels and stockings-- their daughters? Lace socks and Mary Janes. Now we all run around in tennis shoes in an ever present overly friendly casualness that erodes respect. All the roles and lines of behavior are blurred; it adds to the confusion. I suspect it is part of what keeps us all feeling off balance. We may be hiding behind this new eternal childishness however, since responsibility is expected of grown ups. And as Jerry Seinfeld asked, "Who wants to be responsible?"

At some point we need to wake up and take a good look around. Whose fault is it if we can't read? Our first grade teacher's? ANY teacher's?  How many parents have we seen interviewed who can't figure out their child's obesity, yet do all the purchasing of food for the household? How many hours do we think it's okay to spend in front of the TV? Are we depending on someone else to inform us? Care for our health? Educate us?  We seem determined to pass responsibility for our lives off to others. At some point we may decide we don't like it that way, but it will be too late.


How many adults blame their ignorance on the fact that they didn't have an opportunity to go to college? Here's what Ray Bradbury had to say about that: "I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories."  History is full of disadvantaged men and women who taught themselves complicated subjects like Latin and calculus, who solved problems and invented things. But if we aren't valuing history and reading biographies, how are we going to realize that? In this information age with so many resources available it is hard to watch people waste their health, minds, and opportunities. Whatever larger forces are at work (and Hedges covers them well) we are responsible; we are complicit in allowing things to continue the way they are.

Changing all that sounds like a lot of work.

Just as Plato feared, maybe we do prefer the flickering images after all.