To Go to Hell or to Not Go

 

  The one worry I can’t shake is that the world is going down the tubes. I look around and everything seems ok. I'm ok, though I know others are not. I've quit listening to the news, but rumors of war creep in. The flag at half mast tells me there's been another shooting. Even the ostrich with his head in the sand feels vibrations.

  A friend sent me an article recently suggesting I'd find fodder for squibs in it. Squibs are my personal words of wisdom posted here on Sundays. The article discusses how the country is going down the tubes because we spend so much time on our devices while society falls apart.

  The article is called The Great Malformation and it's in the current issue of The Hedgehog Review. You can read it online for free. The subtitle is A personal skirmish in the battle for attention. The author goes back twenty years in his own life and is already worried because his kids would rather play videos games than walk in the woods or read a book.

  Video games are less good because they deal in fantasy while walking and books develop imagination. The author, Talbot Brewer takes responsibility for his kids being on their screens. He says they turned into happy, productive adults, but things are worse now.  The village that helped raise his kids is not the same. Now everyone is on his or her screen all the time.

  Talbot worries where this is taking us. He says our culture is now based on making money and our current predicament started six generations ago when the market economy kicked into high gear. He mentions Ben Franklin worrying way back that this could be a bad thing. Talbot said he would explain briefly how we got here. I scrolled down. This is a long article for my attention span, but even if I couldn't get any squibs out of it, I could digest it and turn into a Friday post.

  Very briefly: our culture used to shape the economy so that the economy would give us what we wanted. The economy has done such a good job that now the economy shapes our culture. And we don't care as long as we get our stuff. We want our children to have a good life too but Talbot worries about that. He believes the economy is depleting the earth's resources and future generations will be impoverished.

  We have gone to sleep Talbot believes and the solution is for us to wake up. He doesn't give specifics. It would be unfair of us to ask for specifics. Talbot ends on a hopeful note when his little daughter from his second marriage asks him to put down his phone and play Jenga with his wife and his mother-in-law. This little group of elders is the new village that will help raise his daughter. Jenga is an apt image for life, pulling things from our base to build a tower. Then starting over when the tower falls, as it always does.

  Talbot's solution for our civilization is for us to wake up from our screen-induced trance. But how do we wake up in the first place? The theme of this issue of The Hedgehog Review is "Theological Variations" so it's odd that Talbot did not mention the Buddha, Jesus, or Mohammed. Any one of these has very specific instructions on how to wake up. Once truly awake, we'll know what to do. 

The Big Bang in centimeters. What a difference losing the minus sign makes!