Becoming Strangers in a Strange Land
When we wake up and look out each day, more and more we find ourselves to be strangers in an increasingly unrecognizable world. Too much ongoing change and no time to adjust from moment to moment to each new alteration to our realities. As I get older, I desperately realize that I must find a way to somehow minimally comprehend from moment to moment where the world is and where it seems to be going. How else am I going to be able to make the difficult choices and decisions?
Of course, that is an absurd thing to try to do. We live in an age of ever accelerating change. We are bombarded by so many messages, images and sounds every second of every day that we are forced go filter out everything except that which is immediately relevant to our own lives. Over time, we lose the capacity to comprehend the bigger picture. We have our lives to live and little if any time left over a the end of the day to capture the critical information we need to know. So, little by little, we become cultural illiterates in our own society and in our world.
Of course, in time, we will look back and sort out the pattern of the past. We will retrace the path that brought us, we arrogant human beings, to this moment. Hindsight usually serves that purpose. Historians will capture the essence of the past for us and revisionists will put their particular spin on what the historians have written. Hopefully, we will be able to sort out what passes for truth from the bullshit.
However, in the present time, we should still be able to get some sense of where the rushing stream of time is carrying us. Thankfully, the internet gives us easy access to a wealth of information sources. It is a matter of first beginning with defining what we want to know. Then we need to carefully figure out the questions we need to ask, carefully framing the questions and then looking for the answers we seek. We have to allocate the time to do this and time is a commodity which is in short supply for most of us. So we are going to have to give up some of the "pleasures" of life.
What will that get us? Some understanding of what we are up against in the larger world. There is just too much to take in. The environment. Politics. The ethics or lack thereof in the matter of abortion and capitol punishment. Economics. The lousy economy. Wars. Inequalities in society. Education issues. Who is going to win the Superbowl? What is happening in the Arts. Is Global Warming a real deal? And so on... and so on. The best that we will be able to do is to focus on a few things that are important to us and settle for that. If it was tough to be a universal man ( or woman) in the past, it is infinitely tougher to do that today.
We know that the world is being changed in radical ways every day. The period from 1900 to 1930 marked the end of the 19th century take on theater, ballet, music and literature, and the transformation of the Arts into a reflection of what the world was actually becoming in the 20th century. In our own times, evolving technologies have touched the ways we communicate, how we think about things, how we do things, the sounds of our times, our values and how we entertain ourselves. The computer and the internet have forever altered the landscape of human life. We live in amazing and equally terrifying times. We have quite a task before us if we are going to make any sense of our new realities.
I won't begin to even suppose that I can lay out a game plan to do this in this brief posting. But most certainly, I will pose a challenge to everyone who reads this post. Instead of always pursuing some of our more pointless diversions (television, video games, texting), begin to become aware of the world about you. Start asking serious questions when you see something that seems dangerous or very wrong. When you see real problems around you, make a real effort to put your own house in order and maybe even make a difference in the world.
We live in contentious and desperate times. We can rationalize that there is no reasonable way that we can ever understand the changes in the world. And we can be blindsided when things go disastrously wrong. Or we can at least try to make an effort to understand the state of things and make a difference in the outcome not just for us individually, but for our family, our country or the world
The current realities are ever a moving target, morphing minute to minute. We face a daunting task to do reality checks from time to time to take a measure of where reality stands in that moment. But if it is a nearly impossible task, we still have to do it, if we are going to make sure we are headed in the right direction. It is just something we have to do. Not fun, but necessary.
Of course, that is an absurd thing to try to do. We live in an age of ever accelerating change. We are bombarded by so many messages, images and sounds every second of every day that we are forced go filter out everything except that which is immediately relevant to our own lives. Over time, we lose the capacity to comprehend the bigger picture. We have our lives to live and little if any time left over a the end of the day to capture the critical information we need to know. So, little by little, we become cultural illiterates in our own society and in our world.
Of course, in time, we will look back and sort out the pattern of the past. We will retrace the path that brought us, we arrogant human beings, to this moment. Hindsight usually serves that purpose. Historians will capture the essence of the past for us and revisionists will put their particular spin on what the historians have written. Hopefully, we will be able to sort out what passes for truth from the bullshit.
However, in the present time, we should still be able to get some sense of where the rushing stream of time is carrying us. Thankfully, the internet gives us easy access to a wealth of information sources. It is a matter of first beginning with defining what we want to know. Then we need to carefully figure out the questions we need to ask, carefully framing the questions and then looking for the answers we seek. We have to allocate the time to do this and time is a commodity which is in short supply for most of us. So we are going to have to give up some of the "pleasures" of life.
What will that get us? Some understanding of what we are up against in the larger world. There is just too much to take in. The environment. Politics. The ethics or lack thereof in the matter of abortion and capitol punishment. Economics. The lousy economy. Wars. Inequalities in society. Education issues. Who is going to win the Superbowl? What is happening in the Arts. Is Global Warming a real deal? And so on... and so on. The best that we will be able to do is to focus on a few things that are important to us and settle for that. If it was tough to be a universal man ( or woman) in the past, it is infinitely tougher to do that today.
We know that the world is being changed in radical ways every day. The period from 1900 to 1930 marked the end of the 19th century take on theater, ballet, music and literature, and the transformation of the Arts into a reflection of what the world was actually becoming in the 20th century. In our own times, evolving technologies have touched the ways we communicate, how we think about things, how we do things, the sounds of our times, our values and how we entertain ourselves. The computer and the internet have forever altered the landscape of human life. We live in amazing and equally terrifying times. We have quite a task before us if we are going to make any sense of our new realities.
I won't begin to even suppose that I can lay out a game plan to do this in this brief posting. But most certainly, I will pose a challenge to everyone who reads this post. Instead of always pursuing some of our more pointless diversions (television, video games, texting), begin to become aware of the world about you. Start asking serious questions when you see something that seems dangerous or very wrong. When you see real problems around you, make a real effort to put your own house in order and maybe even make a difference in the world.
We live in contentious and desperate times. We can rationalize that there is no reasonable way that we can ever understand the changes in the world. And we can be blindsided when things go disastrously wrong. Or we can at least try to make an effort to understand the state of things and make a difference in the outcome not just for us individually, but for our family, our country or the world
The current realities are ever a moving target, morphing minute to minute. We face a daunting task to do reality checks from time to time to take a measure of where reality stands in that moment. But if it is a nearly impossible task, we still have to do it, if we are going to make sure we are headed in the right direction. It is just something we have to do. Not fun, but necessary.
posted by hfireman | 10:46 PM
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