turn up the volume!

When everyone is talking to everyone else all the time -- when Twitter and texting and 'networking' and Facebook-liking and getting Linked In consumes ever-increasing amounts of time and credulity -- it is as if everything takes on a low, glue-y hum and the importance of any one thing is shut out or shut down ... drowned in some warm and slurpy blub-blub-blub that ought to be deeply-satisfying and consonant, but isn't.

And within such a context, if it actually exists, a scream -- some volume-raising expression -- seems to be the only option as a means of designating something important ... until, of course, the screams themselves are consumed and reduced and forgotten within the glue. When everybody is louder, the yardsticks for substantive importance are once again drowned out. When everyone is oh-so-connected, it seems that the connections are lost. Everything is louder, but who can hear within this glue-y racket?

Turn up the volume! The frustration and disconnectedness in a world of 'connections' is just too much. Turn up the volume! And yet too, with the rise of, say, the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street, there is a sense of connection, however badly defined, however amorphous, however loud.

A scream. Sometimes, with or without solution, a scream is all there is. Is a scream the beginning or the end? I'm not sure. Maybe it is just ... everything ... and nothing ... for the moment.

What brought all this to mind was a video clip a friend sent along in e-mail yesterday. I can't tell if the clip is staged or actually happened, but I guess it doesn't matter much -- the scream is there ... in this case, the topic is the 'greatness of America.'

It's loud, it's heart-broken, it's angry and anguished, it's pent-up frustration let loose, it's sick of the bullshit and simultaneously recognizing that the bullshitters will win because if they lost, it would be too dismal and their well-pressed philosophies would get a  very bad case of the wrinkles ... and the Audi or iPhone wouldn't run right.

Little or large, I suspect everyone's got their screams, their emphatic, volume-up, no-other-option reaction to one thing or another ... their very-truth of very-truth even if the truth remains obscured. No one else's glue-y, Pablum-esque solutions will do. No one else's spiritual or philosophical recommendations are relevant, no matter how appropriate or wise or relevant.

This is THIS!

I guess it can be called a beginning, but I don't think I'd say that out loud.