IS ANYBODY LISTENING?

 IS ANYBODY LISTENING?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 27, 2012

Newspapers are dying.  Blogging is rising.  Facebook, Youtube, Googleplus and host of others are dumbing us down to a commonplace, while cable television is making news as entertaining as Disney cartoons and equally as relevant. 

Against this uninterrupted tsunami surge, a few pondering middlebrows attempt to gain our attention against the clashing noise of these crushing waves. 

We have the legend of the Pied Piper leading children to the mountain where they disappear in full.  My wonder is what will be said a hundred years from now when the metaphorical Pied Piper leads mindless society to the abyss with no one aware of the danger because their attention is elsewhere.

David Brooks is a New York Times columnist who is too sensible to have such an apocalyptical view of the future.  He reads, observes, writes, doggedly trying to get the attention of those he believes could restore order to the chaos, along with some morality to the decadence, in short, some positive spin to actual reality. 

He reads some of the same people I do, and writes books about what they have to say.  For example, he has come to believe feelings are an important part of thinking, and has justified this assessment by referring to the works of Antonio Damasio, among others. 

Brooks is always gentle in his probing, somewhat of a middle of the roader, working for a newspaper that is skewed so far to left that it takes a telescope to find the center.  How he survives in that culture can only be explained if one reads Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” of which it resembles more than the newspaper would like to admit. 

But I wander from my premise, “Is anybody listening?”  Obviously, they aren’t and I’m singling out David Brooks for his patience to abide the times by writing his columns and books, going home to his family, and apparently telling himself, I’m doing all that I can against the forces of this tsunami, and letting it go at that.

Today (Sunday, May 27, 2012), his column sounds like a commencement speech to the four walls of his study addressed to the more privileged college graduates of this spring, by privilege I mean those HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite) institutions that cost a fortune to attend, and then expect multiple fortunes in turn for the attendance. 

Brooks is concerned about these grads skewing their careers mainly to finance and business to the exclusion of a myriad of other possibilities.  He doesn’t say it but I couldn’t help but see the similarity to the recruitment and cultivation of high school athletes to attend our football and basketball colleges with the promise of large professional bonuses and contracts when they complete their matriculation.  It is the same motivation but skewed a little differently. 

For the athletes so motivated, education is not even relevant but something to endure to get those professional scouts at their games.  For these prospective Wall Street financiers and consultants, these entrepreneurs and prospective CEOs, the motivation is the same with a catholic education secondary to getting those high grads from high flying institutions so that they qualify for the big show on Wall Street or in corporate America.

We wonder why our society is walking around headless operating on instinct when nine out of every ten college graduates are not invited to the party, but must fend for themselves with what is left of the economic pie when nine out of the ten slices are not left when they go to get their piece.  It is the same of all those aspiring athletes in college that don't have a tinker's damn chance of becoming professional athletes.  

Compounding this ridiculous picture, the 90 percent left out of the sharing are the ones buying the tickets that cost a fortune for the athletic contests of professional athletes.  They watch the ridiculous cable sport critiques of every moment of these athletes, tune into the radio shows that discuss and cuss these same performances, and live fully vicarious lives while sharing the economic peels left for them. 

Making the picture even more absurd, these college graduates that don’t count find it necessary to attain a worthless MBA degree, feeling some kind of kinship with the ten percent that have ninety percent of the goodies.  Meanwhile, the ten percent plays monopoly for real with their retirement funds and limited savings on Wall Street, often risking the pensions of teachers and other unions to acquire bigger bonuses with no one the wiser, especially the ninety percent that have never had an opportunity to share in the economic pie in the first place. 

David Brook is too much of a gentleman to say such things said here.  He actually believes the people of HYPE are smarter, that they are the “best and the brightest,” which they were called a few years ago.  They aren’t.  They are just subtler about their greed. 

Yesterday, I wrote that we have lost our sense of community.  I also implied that we are most comfortable with our own kind, but that possibility has been obliterated in an age of continuing warfare and electronic social connecting. 

During the Great Depression, for one example, when the African American Church was the cornerstone of a black community, the majority of black families were two parent families, and unwed childbirth was practically unknown.  This was during our worst economic times.  Despite the times, the center held firm for the black family.  Today more than 50 percent are single parent families, and more than 60 percent of births are out of wedlock. 

In that same piece, I mentioned that once you change the status quo it is changed forever, as you cannot go back.  But you can restore the compass as governor to existence as we go forward, hopefully more wisely. 

We have discovered in the last sixty years that the religious is a human and flawed institution, that it exhibits the same depression, self-indulgence and structural flaws that have come to be common to us all.  So, there is not much point in blaming the church, or waiting for the church to correct itself.  It won’t happen until we do.  It is not a chicken and an egg proposition. 

Brooks claims young college graduates have deep moral yearnings, but tend to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions.  How true.  It is a way to separate us from the taint of our own reality.  He ends by saying these same young people should get away from Excel spreadsheets and read Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.  Dostoyevsky, as my readers know is one of my heroes, and they also know I write like Job.

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