Lair Davis

Turn Up the Radio!

We live such polluted lives! We seem to be forever polluting the atmosphere, the environment.

Noise pollution is everywhere. Even hikers in the rainforest wear earphones from which leaks the metal screeching of guitars. Around the pool and along the beaches the radios are blaring. Televisions blast out their streams of commercials as people go about their indoor living without a thought in their heads.

I suspect I know why it is so: In silence, meaningful thoughts intrude. Such thoughts scare the bejeezus out of many folks. They might actually think about what they are doing with their lives, about the emptiness is their existence! Quick! Turn up the radio!

Go stand on any corner and look northward. How many advertisements do you see? Now look to the south. More? Now to the east. Still more, blocking the view. Look west. The advertisements ARE the view! That handsome guy over there thinks he’s looking fine with some logo blazing from the t-shirt on his chest. He actually paid to wear that — bought the marketing ploy — and became the shill for some beer manufacturer. He thinks it’s really cool. It’s really, really dumb.

Advertising — visual pollution — is so common, so saturating that most young people think it is normal. It is not normal. It is sick. It is a sign of a mentally-impaired culture that hasn’t a clue that it’s off its rocker.

Western culture (which is synonymous with United States culture) suffers from the disease of gluttony. It can’t get enough. Just like the dinosaurs. You know what happened to them, don’t you?

Here is the pollution topper to end all toppers: We have built an entire society based on oil, a completely non-renewable, non-sustainable, environmentally- and socially-disastrous energy source. We burn that energy and let its residue openly pollute the atmosphere, using the environment as a huge combustion waste repository, deliberately ignoring the fact that we breathe that very same atmosphere.

Geez! What idiots we are! And we think we are so smart! If there is a god, why in heaven would he/she want to bother saving such stupid creatures?

I doubt that she does. And I do not believe, as do the cockeyed optimists (who are really just dreamers), that we are capable of saving ourselves. Most people cannot even face the fact that there is a problem.

If I were one of those who breed (speaking of polluters), I would think long and hard before getting about the business of conceiving and birthing yet more of these polluting creatures. What kind of thoughtless, selfish individuals would want to bring more people into such a world, knowing what we know those children will face in the near future.

Then again, if you drown out all thought with noise and visual pollution and take a ride in your gas-guzzling SUV while wearing your Budweiser t-shirt, then you really need not think about all that, eh, baby?