What a crazy world we live in when people we don’t know battle every day to take up our collective psychic space. Wouldn’t it be better if we knew the concerns of our next door neighbor a little better and those of the Kardashians a little less? Are 50 people in the world making all the non-newsworthy headlines, most of them people with even less talent than brains and unquenchable thirsts for notoriety?
Something I read last December when Prince William, wife and kiddo visited NYC sums up this problem nicely. A woman queuing for her 15 second view from behind a cordon told a reporter she saw the royal couple as “role models.” “They’re a power couple,” she gushed. Um. Yeah. The “power” part is self-evident. But “role models?” For what? To reaffirm that either you’re born into a royal family or not? It’s not like we can work hard and one day become heir to a throne. It’s more likely we’ll be the ones digging up some lovely muck like the anarcho-syndicalists in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. The system’s rigged to have more losers than winners. Sorry, Charlie! You stay on the outside and keep peering in and be grateful for it.
I guess I like having silences and spaces in my mind with no twitter feeds or facebook posts rushing in to fill them. And what I would prefer to cogitate upon isn’t Gwyneth Paltrow’s most recent thoughts on “unconscious coupling” or one damn thing about Lady Gaga. Instead, I like to switch on my Berry College bald eagle camera and watch the momma eagle huddle over her fledglings during a winter storm or tear apart a dead coot and feed it to them piece by ragged piece. As I watch, I wonder if anything I’ve done is as essential and as heartbreakingly courageous as what these birds do every day.
Here’s the link: