And this week the world has been rocked by Japan’s latest and greatest unfortunate disaster. I sit and watch the clips and news feeds from my computer. eBay pack and ship process gets suspended while I sit riveted to the screen. There is a certain feeling that runs through you when you are witnessing something truly historical – and it seems right and natural to suspend ones activities and pay attention – pay respect – this is one for the books. Like the first lunar landing. The assassination of a president. The Challenger explosion. 9/11…
I’ve lived long enough to see the virtual entirety of monumental events that have been televised – which is a far faster means of transmission of information than we had during the Revolutionary, Civil, World, or Korean War periods here.
One of my earliest memories, in fact, was in Kindergarten, and the teacher wheeled in…(gasp!)…a television set!! She then proceeded to tell us about men going to the moon, and space travel and adventure – and we watched Apollo 13 launch. This was truly of national significance, and deemed something even the smallest of citizens should be aware of.
And for the first time, we had the visual media to instantly convey this information to the citizens of this country. We didn’t have to huddle around a radio and imagine it – we could see it with our own eyes! We did not have to wait for the papers to write the articles about it – we watched it happen live! Considering that the television in my home took a few minutes to warm up, and only came in black and white – well, this was just frickin’ amazing!
The technology of television was an awesome addition to the human consciousness. And that’s what this is all about: Consciousness. Stop for just a moment, and think long and hard about what that is. To some it sounds like a spiritually fluffy word used by the "2012" crowd – to others it just means the difference between awake and asleep. But what does it really mean, without the bias?
I love the freedictionary.com definition:
“A sense of one’s personal or collective identity, including the attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or considered characteristic of an individual or group.
Alertness to or concern for a particular issue or situation.”
I read this, and I can only think…oops. We’ve collectively and selectively put ourselves to sleep.
Let me explain. But first of all, please know this is not even remotely to be construed as a political piece about the evils of the media. Please. This is just a few statements of fact, with my ideas sprinkled over the top, designed to get people to think, and nothing more.
When we look over the definition of consciousness, there is something more there than simple awareness – it is both personal and collective: Who I am, and who I am in relation to all the other life on the planet. Seems we’ve lost some substance here, and it’s starting to show up in spades all over the planet.
Who are you? Think back to a time when things were not quite as complicated. That question had a pat, standard, inarguable and quite stable answer. I am me, from the tribe of US, part of the greater OUR nation. If you look at some of the indigenous tribes still scattered throughout the remote areas of the world, you don’t find major psychological issues, depression, or teenagers wandering around in angst over their hairstyle being ripped off by the other girls in school. No, you were born on this plot of land to this lineage, as soon as you were able, you were expected to work and contribute in some meaningful way to the survival of your “family”. There you have it, a personal and collective consciousness. Pretty limited in scope, because it took a while for news to travel, but the bottom line is that they did not really need much of the news they got anyway. It did not concern them or the day to day function of their families.
But surely on many occasions it may have been threatening – to hear of people or animals moving into your territory, and threatening your food supply. This would require the elders to put a plan together, and the clan pretty much trusted them to do right by the rest of them – because they needed each other. In a mutual, need-meeting energy system, the leaders took care of the people, and the people took care of the leaders – everyone benefited, and thereby the bonds remained, and remained strong. (At least up until the more “advanced” people came and wiped the less “advanced” people out, pick a genocide, any genocide – the story reads the same. Another blog.)
So, back to consciousness – our ancestors did not have all that much to be conscious of – and therefore they were focused, and efficient, and productive, and by and large, successful. (Exhibit A: America, et. al.) But what makes us uniquely human is the very way that we choose to expand our consciousness. It’s not enough to know that we put a seed in the ground and in a few months we’ve got food from the ground. No – at some point in time, people began to ask things like “why” and “how” – and our consciousness grew to include not just the daily grind, but the reason behind the daily grind. And then someone thought up nifty ways to make the daily grind less grinding. And all this forward thinking has been brought into the consciousness of US – and we are now seldom satisfied with simply what is – we have dined on a bushel full of fruit from the good old Tree of Knowledge, and with every bite of delicious fruit, we discover a little rotten spot on the inside:
We built a city! We can work together for good! Where do we put all the poop and how do we keep it out of the water?
We invent artificial food! No one will ever go hungry! Why is everyone so fat, and where did that tumor come from?
We’ve discovered antibiotics and immunizations! No more senseless deaths! Where did MRSA come from, and how come our own immune systems are so shitty? Guess we better keep inventing more drugs to replace the human defense system.
We’ve invented convenience EVERYTHING! You can go faster with your single-serve, pre-cooked, plastic-wrapped, disposable boxed lunch-to-go than if you took the time to make a sandwich! No more clunky glass bottles for us! We’re the plastic generation! Any ideas on what to do with all the garbage we’re producing? Anyone?
The list of our advancements that have actually caused more problems than they solved is - well - google. But that’s the nature of the Knowledge from the Tree – Good? Or Evil? You are the one who has to plug whatever the issues are into your consciousness and decide which it is.
And with each and every human advancement – technological or otherwise - we have brought another thing into our consciousness. One more thing to think about. One more thing to consider when living your life from day to day. You no longer have to think about whether the flour you bought last winter has worms in it – today you must decide whether you will purchase white or whole wheat, this brand or that brand, from this store or that store, with this coupon or that club card. Before you go to the market, you have to remember where your credit card is, your ID, your wallet, your keys, check your bank balance, plan your trip on your GPS to make the most time, so you can get it all done in under two hours. Which is a whole other gig compared to getting the egg money out of the cookie jar and taking the wagon into town for the day, now isn’t it? Consciousness feeling a bit crowded?
And now enter the television. And the media. And the internet. The World Wide Web. Cable. Satellite. Pod casts. YouTube. Video games. The noise of it all! How much can you really be conscious of and do it any mental justice? Well, not that much. Some folks can handle more input than others to be sure – but no one can grasp it all. And so – in our wonderfully adaptive way – we simply don’t. We engage in what I would call selective assimilation, allowing into our consciousness only that which we choose, and discarding the rest. When you are driving down the road, you focus on the patch of asphalt in front of you, fairly ignoring the far larger expanse of green grass on either side of you. And, well, woe to you if you don’t…
But herein lies the “evil” part of all of this – with so many, many, many, many choices of things to be aware of, how do we choose which ones to spend quality time in our consciousness? How do we choose to act upon the ones we esteem worth entertaining? What, if any, laws govern this?
As I see it, there really are none. Certainly, we are told what is and is not important every day on the news. But there are as many news sources as news subjects, we are still left adrift in a virtual sea of information, all vying for top spot in our consciousness.
Now, this is all very entertaining, mind you. Just get a Facebook account, and add about 100 random people, and read the posts every day. Why, just today my “friends” wanted me to put as top priority in my consciousness 100 things, from the fact that Tina was having a bad hair day to the devastation in Japan. My friends also wanted me to be aware of a herd of Farmville requests, 17 music videos, 10 Hollywood happenings, seven altruistic Causes, five status-report requests, three baby pictures, and one obituary. And that’s just in four hours alone.
Now, come on…that is just too much information coming at you. You have to put your brain on warp drive and filter through all of it one by one, quickly, sorting them out, keeping this one, discarding that one, ignore that one, share that one, support that cause and offer a condolence. And that’s just Facebook – a completely unnecessary application for anyone’s life. Fun – handy – useful – but completely and totally unnecessary. Like most of the stuff we have crammed our lives and brains full of. How many more apps are taking up our brain’s hard-drive that we really don’t need?
Again – none of the knowledge is good or bad in and of itself – it’s what we choose to do with any of it – and whether or not it really has anything to do with our life, or has any business in the top ten things in our consciousness, either personally or collectively.
How many of us have sacrificed our time or energy for Hollywood consciousness? Does what Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie do have anything to do with you? Or your life? Despite the whole 6-degrees of separation thing, most of us will have to answer an honest, “No”. Then why do we spend an hour reading People magazine? Well, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s actually much easier to spend that hour reading about who wore what to the Oscars and how much they spent on their outfits than paying the electric bill or writing a note of thanks to my sisters for the housecleaning. And I can hide for months behind all the clutter in my consciousness.
And so my kids came home from school today, and I asked them if they had heard about what had happened in Japan.
“Yeah. They showed us the video. Is there anything to eat?”
“Did they tell you about the severity of it?”
“What? The earthquake? Yeah. Can I have the last brownie?”
“You don’t get it, do you?” I ask.
“Get what? It’s just an earthquake and a tidal wave. What’s the big deal?”
Now, these are the same kids who came home last week all in a rage over the proposed budget of Governor Walker here in Wisconsin. When queried about their knowledge of this, I heard a loosely translated, disgruntled teacher’s utterings on a topic that my video-gaming kid clearly has no real grasp on. But he sure thought this was serious stuff. So much for “Johnny, what did you learn in school today?”. They didn’t really learn anything except the opinion of one vocal teacher. Their heads were filled with meme upon meme (look it up...) of useless (to them at this juncture) information. Not because it was not important to this teacher – but it is not important to them. It has no place in the top 100 things these kids should be conscious of. It may well be someone’s mission in life to try and overthrow a government, but it’s not theirs. They would be far better served being conscious of the fact that the dishes need to be done, the dogs need to be fed, their homework needs to be done and they need to help out with their brother.
Certainly on a broader scale, they should be made aware of the political process, and the application of it that we are seeing in our state these past few weeks, and it’s place in their collective consciousness. But to try and shove it into the top spot of their personal consciousness – well – where is the difference between informing and rabble-rousing? Where is the line between communication of information and just plain old gossip? How much of the information that we take in each day do we actually NEED to define our reality, both personally and collectively, and how much is just useless information distracting us from what is truly important?
It’s been my observation that we are teaching our people that picking and choosing our consciousness is something best handled by the media. You no longer have to experience something for yourself – you get to see it on TV and depending on the spin, get mad, or get happy over what you see. You are never really asked to DO anything about so much of this – because you don’t need to. It’s all being taken care of by the people who are actually involved. Whether you love something or hate it, all the media really wants is ratings. There is nothing you can do about 99% of what you are exposed to every day – just like the lawn you drive by on the way to work that needs to be mowed. You can see it, you can notice it, you can be reminded that your own grass needs to be cut – but you really can’t do anything about your neighbors lawn.
Ah! But the media might just start a campaign – an awareness campaign – a consciousness appeal – to all the un-mown, unsightly lawns in the neighborhood. Yes, let’s have a meeting now, and piss and moan about people who don’t mow their lawns religiously. Let’s crucify the Widow Tate and Charlie the Drunk! Let’s kick them out of the community! Let’s make a law, and threaten them with fines and legal action if they do not keep the grass mowed to our standard (which we shall spend hours determining) of proper grass length. We need these laws to help make the world a better place! And we go home justified. We spoke our peace. We make our voice heard! Yay for us!
But maybe – just maybe – if Mrs. Tate’s and Charlie’s neighbors actually took the time to talk to them, and find out that she cannot handle a lawn mower any more and can’t afford a lawn service, and Charlie needs to check into rehab but has no support system, maybe we could actually become involved and offer to mow their lawns for them. Maybe we could make the world a better place by simply meeting a need, instead of needing a meeting. Maybe if instead of just blustering and pontificating about the problem we just applied our consciousness to the reality of the problem, we wouldn’t need to export our lawn-mowing issues beyond this neighborhood block, and people could apply their consciousnesses to something more profitable in the long run.
Unfortunately, we just don’t choose to do this much anymore. No - it’s just way too easy to be conscious of the latest American Idol than it is about the Japanese disaster. After all, we can’t do much to help them in Japan – but I can call in my vote for Susie Starlet! This is what we are, inadvertently or not, teaching the younger generations to be conscious of.
We don’t have much at all anymore in the way of a substantive, collective consciousness. Hell, I don’t even know my neighbors names – and I’m not alone in that. We keep to ourselves – our personal consciousness is all that matters here: My bills, my money, my job, my family, my TV, my stuff, my car, my dog, my lawn. We don’t know where we belong in our communities – most of us could up and move away and no one would notice but the postman.
We have substituted the media’s rendition of the collective consciousness as our reality. We won’t bother finding out that our neighbor has a need – instead we look to the media to find where to spend our money “helping” others. We will happily “get involved” spreading awareness, as long as it can be done from the safety of our Lazy Boy recliner, or behind the screen of our computer. Our community is now on-line. We don’t reach out and touch someone – we offer them a {{BIG HUG}} via IM that it is doubtful we would ever give them should we meet them in the supermarket. We are long on sentiment, and very, very short on personal application.
We have, as I said, put ourselves to sleep. We stopped at some point thinking for ourselves. We no longer looked around to see what we need to allow into our consciousness, for us to do something about, live our lives by, and carry on our tasks for. We have our personal consciousness – which trumps anyone else’s, because the media tells us that we need to coddle our fragile egos and put ourselves first. And the media tells us that our collective conscious is that which we behold on television. Events that happen at Degrassi are much more important than the kid next door who is struggling with finding friends in the real world. Contributing to breast cancer research is just way, way more important that offering to clean house for the woman in your community struggling with her chemo treatments, and buying a Shamrock at the gas station is infinitely more valuable than taking a Saturday and building a ramp with the rest of the neighborhood men for a kid with muscular dystrophy.
We are positively robotic in our acceptance of what we should and shouldn’t be conscious of. And today I am simply suggesting that it would be a good idea if we all just stopped for a brief moment, and took a little more responsibility in choosing what we shall be conscious of, both personally and collectively. What really matters? What is truly worthy of space within your marvelously complex brain? What will play a bigger role in making you a better human being, and this world a better place?
It's 2011....do you know where your consciousness is?
