“What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”
~William Shakespeare~
I don’t know about you, but I'm sick of hearing about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama’s racist, anti-Semitic minister. I know, I know, it’s important to the campaign. And it’s not that I'm sitting in Obama’s corner wringing my hands about his chances of winning the primary elections. I'm simply weary with the fact that we as a people haven’t moved beyond this. In my estimation, the dear Reverend isn’t even the main issue here. There have always been and always will be madding, divisive demagogues spewing forth their vitriol to the masses. The question that looms in my mind is, when the masses will stop listening? The real moral tragedy isn’t that the Reverend hates me because I'm white, or hates me because I'm middle class, or hates the Jews. The tragedy is that he has been able to make a lifelong career out of playing the race card and harming his own ethnic community through his attitude of learned and eternal victimhood. If he was one crazy, hateful man, it wouldn’t matter. But he’s not. He’s one hateful man that has 10,000 people in his congregation who evidently really enjoy listening to his drivel. THAT is a moral travesty. My suspicion is that, as senator Obama maintains, many in the congregation aren’t even listening to what he’s saying, perhaps the senator and many others are only there to enjoy the reality-TV-show like shock factor. Regardless of the reason, this huge following is very telling. Our popular culture seems to be more fixated on ideas and people that are shocking or entertaining than upon those that have substance. Our world has become so superficial that we have in many ways regressed into a pre-enlightenment dark age in which spectacle reigns supreme. We look with horror or morbid amusement at the savage glee surrounding witch hunts, but have we not become the same? Giving our attention, and often times support, to an idea or public figure merely because we are amused by the grotesque nature of them? In the last few decades, we’ve lost our moral anchoring, and drifted into hedonism. Now I fear that even hedonism has lost its allure, and something darker and uglier is beginning to hold us in its thrall. Are we becoming modern barbarians? Fixated on the spectacle of watching proverbial blood spill? Only time will tell. We desperately need a grassroots movement that champions ideas , entertainment , and people of substance. The greatest hope for this, I believe is in the free exchange of ideas we find here, on the web. So let’s stop having vapid conversations about hateful men, and move on the dialogues that have some substance!
