How to resurrect citizenship from mindless consumerism? Reading. How to discover issues relevant to the health of America? Reading.
Many find reading intolerably uncomfortable. After all, here we sit holding an object in a generally immobile position, be it a Kindle or a book, for a long period. There is little hint of a reward in the activity. Two common priorities of most people are convenience and comfort. In this case many wonder, the convenience of what? The discomfort is self-evident.
Reading is not a skill we’re born with, but something we develop. It can be compared to activities which require strenuous exercise. Riding a bicycle for someone out of condition is exhausting, let alone cycling through countryside hills, no matter how beautiful the scenery. Yet, with repeated efforts, first short rides and then longer ones, the strain on the legs and back become less of an annoyance as we begin to enjoy the scenery we’re riding through. Acquiring reading skills works the same way, maybe beginning with short magazine articles, working our way into short novels, from there into non-fiction books on a favorite topic, and finally absorbing denser material of significant length
.
As Ray Bradbury pointed out sixty-five years ago in “Fahrenheit 451”, this is the exact reverse that the trend of published reading material took. From romantic and Victorian novels when authors were paid by the word, through shorter 20th century works and into the mainstay of reading matter in the 1950s, Reader’s Digest, to the absurdity a Cliff notes, and then into the computer age 600 word maximum for most blogs, and finally the death knell of offerings, the triple whammy: Facebook to Twitter to selfies. Reading has become apparently anachronistic.
Someone pointed out that globalism is not an organic development but the result of policies put into place to allow channeling money into international corporations. Nor is presenting the public with interpreted, media-homogenized sound information delivery an evolutionary development; it is an effective method of turning citizens into consumers.
During the 19th century there existed what was called constitutional news reporting, though Democratic news reading is a better description. When Congressmen or the President made an important speech, it was reported verbatim in newspapers. Readers were able to interpret the pros and cons of arguments made by their leaders for themselves. I’m sure that with the aid of C-span or turning the pages of the Congressional Record, this is still possible, but the likelihood of someone reading a 3000 word speech by a government official, short of investigative reporting, is less likely than the final installment on the Kennedy assassination.
An educated public can make informed decisions that affect their own welfare.
Such vitally important choices are impossible so long as the public focus remains fixed on short term emotional gratification. Our society lives in a kind of carnival of news atmosphere as described well in Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. I’ve mentioned this book a couple of times in which he explains this superficial nature of our entertainment. The “death” in the title refers to the elimination of thinking as the conscious act involved in analysis. It’s far easier to slough off considered remarks with an “oh well” than pursue the agonizing process of reasoning. So, we turn, instead, to emotional stimulation.
But this is changing. Americans have always been slow on the uptake for various reasons including caution, self-interest, apathy, and the current malady, disengagement. Nevertheless, as people become more affected by environmental and social-economic changes, they will be forced to look for answers. This will have two beneficial outcomes: an ever-increasing number of people who read, which will lead many to expand their understanding of a situation by reading even more, and, at the least, a larger percentage of people who listen thoughtfully in their desperate search for answers.
