It seems to me that ethnically european cultures have developed a form of disability. There was a time when our societies were more like India is today… People were lively, outgoing and gregarious. Total strangers would chat eachother up on the street corner about topics which were quite engaging and interesting. People would be in their small groups in public places - in the corners and in the doorways actively engaged in projects together. Then, a couple of new technologies came on the scene. Television and radio drew people’s attention inexorably. And it was in this manner that a very few individuals started pulling a stunt like the Wizard of Oz at the Emerald city did in that old film story. The owners of mass media - television and radio - began to spin tales about society; they began to draw up a narrative about the way our society is. If you think about the kind of programming which the network news television stations produce, and which the cable companies select for their services, you have to wonder about the neuroses of the folks who make those decisions. There are patterns which are clearly visible. They are people who fervently believe in the notion of good and bad people. They believe in all the old sociological models about class struggle between the wealthy and the poor… and all the notions of how revolutions foment in the midst of that struggle. So this is the narrative which they place on the events which they speak about in the mass media… and to a certain degree, it is the narrative that we as citizens of the country believe. We tend to believe that the mass media’s narratives are a crystallization of the consensuses of our society, when in actuality these things reflect the demented ideas of an odd group of neurotic aristocrats.

So in our big cities as we walk about in public, we are sullen and quiet as we pass our neighbors on the street, often without a single word offered to greet them in passing. We have accepted the narrative that strangers are dangerous, that there are bad people out there… and we walk past eachother, keeping to a code of silence - because it seems that between looking at the news on television, and the sullen attitudes of our neighbors as they slink by us that generally everybody else wants to be left alone.

And thus, it seems that our society has developed a form of developmental disabiility. We have become nonverbal.

It’s fascinating to reflect on this disturbing change in our society and compare it to the all the anxiety and furor in any given decade around people who plan and organize foolish misadventures and make us all watch the ugly consequences. The neoconservatives and the christian right rallied fervently around the ideas of war and imperialism and domination, and then when they put those ideas into practice, we all see the mess that they created. Early in the 1900s, we had the prohibitionists succeed in their foolish aims. In the latter 1900s, we had our governments building vast arsenals of nuclear weaponry. It seems that these problems of fools putting their foolish agendas into motion always end in shame for those who promoted them. Everybody sees the bad consequences of the actions and we all swear never to let that kind of thing happen again. In my estimation, the more profound danger seems to be a very small percentage of the changes to our society which happen without anyone planning it at all. Television and radio were simply new technologies which were available… and someone decided to pick them up and use them; and in doing so, they derailed all rational public discourse, simply by giving us an illusion that we are discussing things as a society, when in reality it’s a vicarious kind of thing; they are placing their narrative over the events which they report as news. Industrial pollution and loss of biodiversity is another one of these dangers to our future which happened without anyone scheming at all.

My hope is that with the internet giving everybody the ability to publish text, video and audio - we can return to a better kind of society where people are more socially engaged in public. It will take a few decades, but it will be a vast change. There was a time when some marginalized groups of people were very anxious about the advent of photography. That technology hasn’t affected our society in a bad way - and I think the reason is that the tools were freely available to everybody for them to use.