Across the years a number of people have suggested that I write a blog. Having said this I don’t want anyone to think that there has been a groundswell, by “a number” I mean 15, maybe 20 if I were using a very liberal interpretation of the term “suggested.” However, in my defense, this is more people than have suggested that I take up dowsing (finding water with a divining stick) or design a city of the future (like Brasilia and we all know how that turned out). So with such tepid encouragement I have decided to launch into the heavily chummed waters of the blogosphere (or whatever it is that the young kids are calling it these days).
Since this is already a bit on the self-indulgent side I might as well continue on my solipsistic path and explain what the theme or telos of this blog is going to be. And put rather succinctly the answer to that is that I do not know. What that means is that it will be about things that I find of interest, which I hope are of interest to other people. With that said I do want to be careful and not have it be one of those blogs whose main theme is about how stupid everyone else is, which seems to be the theme of not just blogs but so much of our interactions these days - like the episode of the Simpsons where the morning DJ’s are threatened to be replaced by the automated DJ 3000 which replicated the standard morning DJ repertoire by saying things like, “Looks like those clowns in congress did it again.” My hope is to try and elevate our conversation a bit and to at bear minimum portray those with whom I disagree with respect. And to be quite confessional this is not something that comes naturally to me, but something I think is quite necessary.
When I was in seminary I had a professor who would assign us the task of going out to a church (not of our own denomination) and write a critique of what we experienced. The nastier the critique was the better grade you got. I remember thinking that while this all came quite natural to me it was not something that needed to be reinforced in my being, after all I had spent four years in a fraternity. And so my hope for this blog is basically to be like the stated goal of the Fat Albert cartoon series (before the recent Bill Cosby unpleasantness) and that is my hope is to “[Come] at you with music and fun, and if you're not careful, you might learn something before it's done.”
And so with all of that rambling out of the way I want to take a moment and discuss noise and why a fear of adding to the noise is one of the things that kept me from doing this for such a long time. My favorite example of what I mean by noise comes from the gas station. Many of us are old enough to remember a time when the powers that be entrusted us to pump our gas without music being piped in. When I was 16, despite my youth and naïveté, I could still successfully fill up my gas tank without the soothing intonations of adult contemporary star James Taylor (or some such person). Now if this were not enough the more updated gas stations actually have televisions in the gas pump that sometimes have exclusively produced content (that is what I believe you are supposed to call it). Which I guess means there are people whose job it is to find out what sort of television content will make us more likely to fill your tank all the way or perhaps go inside for a bag of Funyuns. My point in all of this is to reflect on the question of why we have so much noise and why are we so terrified of silence?
Certainly we could blame the companies, but companies tend to do things because they believe they are responding to an unfulfilled desire in the market. Generally speaking when I am not at a gas station or some other such institution that provides unrequested entertainment I see people looking at their phones, which as best I know is a completely voluntary activity. So again what are we worried about? Why do we find being alone with our thoughts something that cannot be allowed? Has a society built on consumerism made us believe that even our thoughts can be outsourced? I realize that I have already brought up the Simpsons and I should have a limit, but it reminds of the time that Homer was in the hospital and saw the guy on a respirator and concluded that breathing was for suckers. Are we in danger of outsourcing our thoughts by never allowing enough time and quiet for them to actually exist? All of that said I want to be quite careful about adding to the noise, that is things that distract us from having any actual moments for reflection.
This may come off a little weasely but I do not fully know the answer to this. It is true that at no time in history have we purposefully and had so much distraction thrust upon us and do we know the consequences of so much distraction? So with that I look forward to go blogging with you and hope to make this worthy of your time.