My thoughts are still very much stuck in the censorship mode. Every word I type becomes a potential liability for later. I think about each word’s impact, how it could be construed (or misconstrued), and why people are so invasively concerned about other peoples’ words.
Margaret Atwood keeps speaking to me; her running dialogue is constantly in the back of my mind saying that language is power. Taking away language is stripping a person of power. There has to be a mechanism – a machine – which controls. Gives and takes away rights and privileges. And she whispers to me in clipped phrases about the danger inherent in taking away peoples’ words, how repressive and scary a totalitarian society would be. Then my brain starts adding to her warnings, and I realize we are moving rapidly toward an anti-intellectual society already. Citizens hand over their right to engage in the political process by paying other people to think for them. Regardless of whether people tend toward the right or the left, there are talking heads on tv and radio who will simply tell them what to think and how to vote. No pesky and time-consuming research needed. George Orwell said that if we don’t think, someone else will do it for us. They are already doing it.
Books are already going away. People don’t read as much anymore because of the omnipresent background of television, the immediate access to the internet, the instant distraction of the cellular phones, and the gaming systems which provide hours of diversion. Borders didn’t go out of business because people are reading all their books on a Kindle; it went out of business because people don’t read books like in the past. Reading is a luxury; it’s time consuming, and sitting down with a cup of coffee and a blanket to read for an hour has been redefined as counterproductive in 2011 America. The implication is that you ought to be DOING something, even if that thing is just stalking facebook for people you graduated with. What would George Orwell think? He is my new answer to the question, “who from history would you go back and spend the afternoon with?” I’m not trying to sound alarmist – I don’t foresee my constitutional rights being taken away in the near future – BUT … it wouldn’t be too hard for the government to do so when people choose not to be informed all the time.
The best action is the common sense one. Logic tells me that sitting on my ass in front of the tv or the computer is not in my best interest. The watching is actively making me stupid and destroying my attention span. Reading requires patience and imagination. Words allude and connote and imply and suggest when they are written well, and the thinking associated with such verbiage is what makes people smarter, because it engages the mind in something beyond looking, receiving, or accepting. The best books are not necessarily the easiest ones to read. Twilight, for example, must have been “good” if so many people read it, but the movie came closely behind and made it unnecessary to read the book. Just stare at the pretty people on the screen and eat your popcorn. Hand over your money and someone will think for you.
Or … read things that cause explosions of revelation in your mind. Pick up Nietzsche or Dostoevsky or Pessoa or Singer or Camus or Eliot. Bend your thoughts around the rigid formations already ingrained and bask in language. Try active rather than passive.
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