Moving Into Ourselves

If you’re not old enough to remember, believe it or not there was a time when Americans didn’t spend half their days being brainwashed into slobbering idiots by television.

Summer days filled with building go-carts – to a nearly full day at the park or neighborhood swimming pool – building fortresses in someone’s back yard, or creating games to entertain ourselves for much of the day – this was the everyday not that long ago.

We might have watched an early morning cartoon and then after breakfast, we were off to the races, not coming back to the home base until dinner time. Of course, this was the everyday of a kid back in the sixties.

In the modern era, you graduate to adulthood and forget whatever creative roots you may have acquired from your childhood and now need a pacifier to ward off reality.

Time Flies: U.S. Adults Now Spend Nearly Half a Day Interacting with Media – Via Nielsen.com

According to the first-quarter 2018 Nielsen Total Audience Report, nearly half an adults’ day is dedicated to consuming this content. In fact, American adults spend over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading or generally interacting with media. Behind this surge are the growing use of new platforms, as well as the younger, multicultural generations who leverage them.

One would like to think that those 11 hours interacting with media might be spent listening to Mozart, reading Dostoevsky, or even studying and working to be the next Dostoevsky. As far-fetched as it may seem to be, I have yet to encounter another reading “Crime and Punishment” or listening to Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony as they scroll down, across or in between the latest text they have their sights set upon.

Instead, we opt out for lesser of all else.

“My god! I’m thinking, what incredible shit we’ve put up with most of our lives – the domestic routine (same old jobs, insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessman, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones -! Ah christ!, I’m thinking, at the same time that I’m waving goodbye to that hollering idiot on shore, what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote)” – Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

It isn’t the insanity of the politician, the media whore, the utter and absolute horseshit we hear from educators, gadabouts, idiot savants and other assorted gasbags that makes us dive into the well of modern day nothingness. It’s that we’ve given up on ourselves and have allowed the psychopath’s dalliances to replace what makes us tick each individually, with what they want us to forget…that being the gifts, talents and brilliance each of us were born with.

The crippled individual using crutches to take a simple step; the down and out individual, sitting on a street corner, demoralized, embarrassed and desperate for your spare change – the elderly enduring a room alone in an assisted living facility, all but forgotten, trying to piece together minute by minute why they are where they are – these are the heroic efforts of ordinary, yet extraordinarily brave souls while many of the rest of us have a shit-fit that our social media accounts aren’t getting enough likes.

We give quarter to useless crap and wonder why the world is in the state it’s in. It’s actually quite simple…we choose to interact with absurdity, nonsense and rubbish day in and day out…willingly.  We allow nutjobs to dictate the way life is, we allow psychopath’s to define accepted ‘normalcy’ – we ignore our gifts, our talents and brilliance, thinking they are banal, not worthy, out of date and unwanted – which is exactly what the psychopath’s want us believing.

We have no more Beethoven’s, Mozart’s, Dostoevsky’s, Twain’s, Martin Luther King’s, O’Connor’s and Mencken’s because truth, beauty and magnificence have been replaced with expectations of something less than ordinary. And we have acquiesced to our “leaders” derangements.

Who knows what human beings today are capable of beyond creating technology that drives us all to stupidity.

History has been written by the victors who want us to remain slaves to their toys and nuttiness. They delight in having us at each other’s throats, delight in keeping us slaves to their offerings, their wars, their discord and insanity.

If we only were to believe in our own gifts, believe in the unique talents each of us have, believe more in our intuition and less in the lies offered to us each day and act accordingly, true to ourselves, we might begin to see the beginning of the end of the farce that is overtaking us all.

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Tonight’s musical offering:

Georg Friedrich Händel (1685 – 1759) Concerto Grosso, Op. 6: No. 2 in F Major, HWV 320 (Allegro)

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