numinous.

I have a tendency to sound sententious. Forgive me.

My generation, and all those proceeding mine, have me embarrassed. I have been born into a time and place where people are no longer hungry to survive, nor are they hungry to thrive. The great majority of my peers are no longer hungry. What scintilla of hunger remains is reserved for idleness. They are pathetic, passive, consumers, hungry for leisure and ease.

Daily I delve into a commotion circulating society, void of zest, void of passion, void of purpose.

Advertising, academics , entertainment, all woo the willful intellect into a lullaby, a deep slumbering recant.

Our lives are not our own. We have lost ourselves, our traditions, our roots, our history and heritage, to the media, to the experts. We are no longer fit to brave life’s excursions without a guiding figure. Uncharted territories exist in a space beyond us and our imagination. We are not fit for such adventure. So we suspend the will to live, forfeit the alms for something greater. Where bridges would be, we spend our lives building walls and cling to our emaciated dreams.

There is no personal history, no family, no origin. We are nationals, Americans, raised by television, the Internet, our schools, our jobs. Starved of new light, our conscience shirks in the penumbra. We are drones.

How do you wake up a nation cultivating and perpetuating its own poison? How do you lay claim to an intellect defined: circumscribed and standardized. What is will? what is freedom? Notions lost to the strong and gifted, a chance missed by all but a few.

In a word, Emerson said ‘A man is what he thinks about all day long.’

Given this description, what state do we find ourselves?

I talk to young minds who have never developed the ability to question. They never ask whether they are on the right path, whether their beliefs are toxic delusions, whether their behaviors and habits will reap negative consequences, or consequences at all.

What becomes of a man who does the minimum in school to get by, who watches TV in his free time, who absorbs societies prescriptions for his health, wealth, future, happiness? Four hours of TV a day? Six hours of TV? Never mind the trash, the propaganda, celebrated on television as glorified miscreants who are impoverished in spirit. Hours of mindless internet surfing? Playing mindless video-games that envelope the consciousness, sucking its attention into a digital world of no consequence?

What will become of our future leaders? Who will follow them? The zombie fascination is a prescient of our future condition.

TV, Mass media, even the beloved science community, has led us to believe a lie. Everywhere we move but rarely do we progress. We adorn our external lives with material fixtures that fade with the fads. Never to do we exercise reflection to look within, to ratiocinate about the barren pallid walls of our world, home to the human spirit, private to us. Instead we chain ourselves to the flux of the masses, the appeal and approval, and overlook the function, the utility of our laboring aims.

Time has become an inconvenience, not because we have so little time, but because we have too much.

I despise the corpulence, the venery, the stolid and dull, all foibles born out of the American malaise.

We need to grow radical. We need to act now, but within. Our fight should exist internally and should be waged endlessly in the name of freedom and imagination, of humanity.