ONE SNOWY WINTER MORNING...
MANY YEARS AGO IN THE CITY of New York, I spoke to a young woman who was addicted to heroine and crack cocaine. She was twenty, emaciated, with ancient eyes full of pain and loss and dread. She was living in a one room in a welfare hotel with her two children, who were two, and four years of age. Her story was the usual tangle of human despair: early pregnancy, dropping out of school, vanished men, smack and then crack and finally heroine. She began to give blow jobs to men in the darkened porn theaters surrounding Times Square to pay for her addiction, while her children waited for her outside for her on the street. I asked her why she did drugs. She shrugged in a vacant way and really couldn't answer beyond: "makes me feel kind of human. " While we talked and she told me her tale of misery and disorder, while her children stared up at the two of us with a disengaged and somewhat lost look.
On my walk back to my office in the snow, I thought about the woman and her spiritless children, and my own hard-boiled indifference. I'd heard so many versions of the same story that I almost never thought about them anymore; knowing that in a hundred cities, women like her are moving in the same meaningless direction. Down through the years, a series of homeless men approached me for change, most of them junkies. Others sat in doorways, staring at nothing. They were the casualties of our time of plague in a country that holds only 2 percent of the world's population, but consumes 65 percent of the world's supply of hard drugs. And I began to wonder why do so many millions of Americans of all ages, races, and classes choose to spend all or part of their lives in such a perplexed state of mind?
When you ask them why they do it, none can give sensible answers. They stutter about the pain in the world, about despair or boredom, the urgent need for magic or pleasure in lives that are empty of both. But then they just shrug. Americans have the money to buy drugs; the supply is plentiful. When you ask any of our politicians why this is happening, they offer the traditional American excuse: It's Somebody Else's Fault. But they never ask why so many Americans demand the toxic poison. Until the early 1960s, narcotics were still marginal to American life. As a kid in the '40's and '50's,, drugs were a minor side-show, a kind of a dark little rumor, one which was termed as "reefer madness," and the bebop generation of jazz musicians began to get jammed with horse. And then came another addiction...Television!
Television, like drugs, dominates the lives of its addicts. And though lonely Americans leave their sets on without watching them, using them as electronic companions, television usually absorbs its viewers the way drugs absorb their users. Viewers can't work or play while watching television; kids can't go out of the house to play with other kids; we no longer read; we don't leave he house to go to a movie, we just plug into pay-for-view; we don't enjoy taking a walk, or quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, we have become asocial. So are drug addicts.
We have now become a country of cheap emotional manipulation. For years now, the cable and television executives have told us that they are giving people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Norte del Valle drug cartel. Is it any wonder that we now rank 19th on the list of international intelligence quotients , behind countries like Japan and Taiwan, Austria and Germany, Belgium and Italy, to name only a few; or rank 23rd in literacy proficiency, behind countries like Finland and Greenland and Lithuania and, of course, Japan?
We do, however, take first place by watching, on average, 23 hours a week, the images spewing forth from our TV sets, which gives us the gold medal in the couch potato Olympics, thus bringing upon ourselves an endless amount of days and nights spent in a state of self-induced mental impairment by losing almost one day per week ogling the tube. Perhaps, for now, we just have to discover a way to switch off the remote and begin reading and walking and talking to one another again...
On my walk back to my office in the snow, I thought about the woman and her spiritless children, and my own hard-boiled indifference. I'd heard so many versions of the same story that I almost never thought about them anymore; knowing that in a hundred cities, women like her are moving in the same meaningless direction. Down through the years, a series of homeless men approached me for change, most of them junkies. Others sat in doorways, staring at nothing. They were the casualties of our time of plague in a country that holds only 2 percent of the world's population, but consumes 65 percent of the world's supply of hard drugs. And I began to wonder why do so many millions of Americans of all ages, races, and classes choose to spend all or part of their lives in such a perplexed state of mind?
When you ask them why they do it, none can give sensible answers. They stutter about the pain in the world, about despair or boredom, the urgent need for magic or pleasure in lives that are empty of both. But then they just shrug. Americans have the money to buy drugs; the supply is plentiful. When you ask any of our politicians why this is happening, they offer the traditional American excuse: It's Somebody Else's Fault. But they never ask why so many Americans demand the toxic poison. Until the early 1960s, narcotics were still marginal to American life. As a kid in the '40's and '50's,, drugs were a minor side-show, a kind of a dark little rumor, one which was termed as "reefer madness," and the bebop generation of jazz musicians began to get jammed with horse. And then came another addiction...Television!
Television, like drugs, dominates the lives of its addicts. And though lonely Americans leave their sets on without watching them, using them as electronic companions, television usually absorbs its viewers the way drugs absorb their users. Viewers can't work or play while watching television; kids can't go out of the house to play with other kids; we no longer read; we don't leave he house to go to a movie, we just plug into pay-for-view; we don't enjoy taking a walk, or quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, we have become asocial. So are drug addicts.
We have now become a country of cheap emotional manipulation. For years now, the cable and television executives have told us that they are giving people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Norte del Valle drug cartel. Is it any wonder that we now rank 19th on the list of international intelligence quotients , behind countries like Japan and Taiwan, Austria and Germany, Belgium and Italy, to name only a few; or rank 23rd in literacy proficiency, behind countries like Finland and Greenland and Lithuania and, of course, Japan?
We do, however, take first place by watching, on average, 23 hours a week, the images spewing forth from our TV sets, which gives us the gold medal in the couch potato Olympics, thus bringing upon ourselves an endless amount of days and nights spent in a state of self-induced mental impairment by losing almost one day per week ogling the tube. Perhaps, for now, we just have to discover a way to switch off the remote and begin reading and walking and talking to one another again...
No comments:
Post a Comment