Too Much Racket

My Grandfather and his brothers saw a car for the first time around 1918 or so, and they chased it down the road because they had no idea what it was.  His daughter would go on vacations on a commercial airliner, like it was nothing at all (because it wasn’t), and his granddaughters have smart-phones, a tablet, e-readers, and a hybrid car.  That’s nothing at all either.

This is where we are, human beings have rushed into technology during the past century like it was now or never.  Before that we were running headlong out of the towns and farms into the industrial revolution which would cheapen life  as people became “labor”, then a couple of wars that would take life’s value below dollar store level.  We’ve been in a hurry for a little while, and changed more in a few generations than seems possible based on the slow evolution of people since we became more than apes.  But can we take it?

We live in a cacophony of input now, our brains are being injected with words and images from everywhere and all the time.  It’s great to have all the information imaginable at hand on the internet, but with every bit of value comes a whole lot of garbage.  While we get more information on everything and anything than ever before, we get more propaganda, more hype, and more cynical.  Is anything out there really unbiased?  I doubt it.  The “real” is in the eyes of the beholder, and we behold exactly what we want to see.  All this information is a self-fulfilling prophecy for each individual; we pay attention to what we believe and we believe what we pay attention to; and the rest is just trying to sell us something else.

How does anyone get any peace with all this noise?  I keep wondering if all this so-called advancement in the “information age” has anything to do with rising substance abuse, child abuse, animal abuse, suicide, economic disaster….Are we all going mad or does the media just like to hype the ones who do so we’ll tune in tomorrow to see who the next - Mamma’s boyfriend who killed her baby he was babysitting while she was at work – is. 

Every week there is some kind of study telling us what to eat or what not to, what vitamins to take or that they all will kill us; then in a week or month another one comes out with the opposite information.  They think no one notices but some things I remember.

I think the only solution is to turn it off, if you don’t feed something it will eventually die.  Attention is like steak and fries to this mess, we should at least make it subsist on white bread (with high fructose corn syrup) and non-bottled water!  That might make it pliable.  Then maybe we could get down to the business of listening to ourselves, figuring out where we are.  There’s something starting to go missing inside of us, and we might have to trace our steps back a while to find it.