August 22, 2004

• An opinion article by Adam Cohen in the New York Times, Sunday Aug. 22, 2004, shows us how the best advice for today is found in the books of old.  The article is about the book “Walden,” by Henry David Thoreau, a book he wrote about his two years, two months, and two days living in a simple shack by a pond.  A book, which, according to Cohen, “buried in its accounts of planting bean fields and starting out at the night sky is some remarkably prescient media criticism.”  Thoreau highlights how, while following gossip or sensationalist news is not a bad thing, as a result of this type of media, society is too easily distracted from the news that matters.  Thoreau also writes a chapter complaining that Americans are not reading the best books, and instead are occupied with cheap novels (I’ve never been asked to read a single thing by Thoreau in school).   Cohen continues, that while Thoreau was following the story of an antislavery insurrection in Haprers Ferry, Va., Thoreau was surprised to see other people “going about their affairs indifferent.”  The main point I want to get to in highlighting Cohen’s article about Thoreau, is how “[Thoreau] believed in the importance of information not merely to improve the mind, but as a guide to action…[he was] not only keeping up with the great moral causes of his day; he was fighting for them.”

  
  

   

  
  

  That’s what my book is about, along with everything else I try to cover.  How to translate words into actions.  In America, people love words, but more often for what other authors have described as mental masturbation.  We soak up information to discuss, not necessarily to put to any good use.  Michael Moore’s books and movies are number-one sellers in America, yet you still get a feeling that people enjoyed the excitement behind his ideas, more than the importance behind his ideas.  You can give us all the red-flags you want in books, about the direction our culture is taking, but we’ll just go about our lives.  “Catcher in the Rye” has become such a classic book, but we don’t reflect that that book is a red-flag that the educational system we have in America is killing the potential of our country’s youth.  And if you reflect on the reason for the title, you’ll realize that the main character in that book, Holden Caulfield, wanted a job as a camp counselor, to kids as they played in a field of rye, if they neared the edge of the cliff.  However, the problem isn’t just that we can’t turn words into actions, but few of us are reading the books and articles that should be rattling society today, in which case, schools should be putting that controversy into the hands of students. 

  
  

   

  
  

  Anyways, this brief article made me reflect that America is probably full of Thoreau’s.  America is full of people who love nature as Thoreau did, people who contemplate the big picture of life, people who don’t live lives of indifference.  However, writing this book has made me realize that while it is the Thoreau’s who will lead to a better America, our system of education kills the spark on would-be Thoreau’s.  Cohen wrote, “Thoreau had some important principles to lay down.  He wrote it for the mass of Americans who, he believed, “lead lives of quiet desperation,” sleeping through life, and missing the most important things going on around them.  His intent, he declared in the epigraph, was to crow like a rooster in the morning ‘to wake my neighbors up.’”

  
  

   

  WELL….COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO EVERYBODY!!!  IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP!!!

  • 4:23 pm
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