This I Believe

I feel a little bit like the little boy who had been dunked in the river for the third time when he was being baptized. When the preacher asked what he believed the lad responded, “I believe you’re gonna drown me if you keep this up.”

In the modern world of technology I believe the human spirit may be drowning. In the world of instant messaging, texting, twittering and text messages, human voices get weaker and weaker, and the weaker those voices become the more trivial the messages become.

When humans had to work hard or wait a long time for a message to get written and then delivered, only the most important thoughts warranted the effort. When we had to walk to the telegraph office or get to a telephone or to write a letter, the thoughts we conveyed had to be important or else they were not worth the effort. No one would have thought to call someone just to share a moment’s thought or mention that there was a bird outside his window. Messages had to be important in order to be worth the time it took to send them.

Today all that has changed. We can send a message virtually anytime from just about anywhere with next to no effort. That has made sending a message easy, and many times that very ease has led to the sharing of thoughts that need not be shared. I was in a grocery store not long ago and overheard a shopper call someone to tell him or her that they had seen a squirrel on the street while driving to the store.

Clearly, this person thought that squirrel was important enough to warrant calling someone else. And the fact that he thought it to be important tells me that he cannot recognize what really is important. The sea of trivia has washed over the lines that once divided the trivial from the important. We no longer can recognize what is important or what is good.

In this day when anyone can send anything anywhere, people can no longer separate what has good quality from what is shoddy. Everything that gets written on a blog is not quality writing, and a lot of people today are saying, “So what?”

“So what,” is the quality of the human mind. Quality is what separates my writing from the writing of Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson. Quality is what separates the works that endure from those that disappear in a day. I believe that quality will endure only so long as humans recognize that not all art is created equal. I believe that learning to separate quality from mediocre is essential to the preservation of civilization. It is an ability that one generation must pass along to the next. Without that ability mediocre will become accepted as superb in a slowly descending spiral.