What's Important Mattters

It's hard to believe, but the modern world continues to confuse me more and more. Every day I see insignificance promoted to the significant while the real is neglected or hidden. I think that in the U.S. , and to a lesser but still important degree elsewhere, people are less informed about the unimportant and more informed about the trivial. This seems to me to be a threat to not only a well understood life, but to the survival of the best part of our culture at the expense of the promotion of the most inane elements.

The "latest news" items to capture public fascination here are the information mediums and public obsessing about the fate of a cyclist (Lance Armstrong) who cheated and lied for years about it and a football player  (Manti Teo) who seems to have created an imaginary girlfriend that he later "killed" in order to win support for an award campaign and to win commercial endorsements.  I care nothing about this nonsense, nor about the stupidity of reality TV shows that pretend to be real or about celebrities whose anti social hijinks that are supposed to amuse or entertain me. But everyone around me thinks it is I who is out of touch with reality.

What I worry about are the increasingly large number of people who live in the world of imagination, of pretending, and of insignificance, and who know or care little about the world as it really is. When we stop caring about the real it is lost and replaced by the shallow. Is that not happening already? The world and we who live in it have changed greatly, and not for the better. Our tastes have changed from the cerebral to the silly, our appetite from the important to the inane. Why does our society more often seek the outrageous but rarely the substantive? Maybe the silly technology we are addicted to has desensitized us and made us worship that instead of the human condition.

Nothing real shocks us or offends us anymore, as we equate the phony with the real and make no distinction between the two. Each new electronic gadget and software is another road away from reality and responsibility to others. I wonder if there is a point at which society will awaken and try to recapture reality, but then, I also wonder if it is capable of even recognizing what is real.