The End of Silence

One of the slicks (as Dubya likes to call magazines) I get every month is the international magazine, Ode. This month's edition is devoted entirely to "silence," or more precisely our world's disturbing lack of silence or quietness.

The article, "Quiet, Please?," is attached (click HERE), and it provides a number of findings and studies about how the lack of silence or even just the lack of quiet can very detrimental to our physical and mental health. The article, at times, gets to be a bit of information overload for me, but it simply confirms a number of thoughts I've had for years:

I hate noise pollution from mowers and leaf blowers. They not only cause horrible noise pollution, they're also incredibly dirty because they're unregulated. The amount of CO2 they emit is atrocious. As the Union of Concerned Scientists relate (LINK), "the average lawn mower emits as much smog-forming pollution in one hour as eight new cars traveling at 55 miles per hour." 

While I own a cell phone, I detest having them go off in one of my classes, and conversations on them do invade public space. Added to that annoyance are the dreaded blue tooth devices that facilitate people walking down the sidewalk as if they've escaped from an asylum and they're talking to their imaginary friends because we don't recognize the ear set (for lack of a better term) right away. The worst is when you're watching a baseball game, and some fool behind the plate or to the side of the plate is on his cell phone (and it's usually a male) while waving and talking to one of his nitwitish brethren on the other line with inane questions such as, "Hey, do you see me?"

The plethora of folks plugged into their iPods disturbs me too. They're all plugged in, shoving out other opportunities to hear the beauty of everyday life: the wind blowing, leaves rustling, birds chirping, kids laughing as they play, etc. The iPod, in this sense, simply exemplifies how our country has a hyper-individualistic culture. We plug iPods into our ears. We drive our pods (cars) to work every day. We park our pods in our pods (garages). And we live in planned pods (houses) that look a lot like the other pods and focus on our our pod (family) while not getting to know our neighbors or going outside much. 

More than anything, I think I and others need much more time to relax and do nothing for a change: time to "recharge our batteries."

The Italian psychologist Piero Ferrucci said it well when he stated, "Our culture is suffering form an overdose of action and a shortage of contemplation. I consider contemplation a basic need; you even see it in animals. Just think about dogs and cats. You often see them starting off into space. I think that their way of meditation, their way of recharging their batteries. We have that need too. But we deny this basic, physiological need--as if an entire society were to forget to go the bathroom. That's serious."