~ ITEM: Watch Kenny Chesney’s Chaotic ‘Noise’ Video
~ ITEM: Photographer Depicts Evils of Smartphones in Stunning Photos
THERE’S A world-wide conspiracy against silence, quiet, calm, and it’s coming at us from all directions at once. For those of us who don’t do life at volume-setting 11, it’s destructive, distracting, confusing, and enslaving. All this noise noise noise noise!
Several times in the past few months I’ve waved or called out a greeting to a neighbour on the street– nope: glued to the phone, the iPod, the distractor. It got me thinking.
Kenny Chesney is right that our modern West is all about noise, propaganda, selling things, babble, infotainment, endless electronic demands, devices which gobble our time, our days, our hours of rest. The question, after awakening to the racket and noise, is to ask “What else is there, instead?”
Everything else ever anywhere. The all-precious electronics? Turn them off.
Leave it home. Silence the alerts. You don’t actually need to answer that e-mail or text or to see the funny new kitten video. Tell people when you’d like them to call on the phone, instead of jumping for every call like it’s the police or the lottery.
Unplug. Just go for a walk– you, God, the birds, the breeze, the bugs, the sunshine on the grass.. no disconnecting or dehumanizing smartphone or iPod or shiny thing. Take a nap. Call a friend. Give an ear to someone who could use a good listener. Real things are best: friendship, society, leaving things and people better than you found them.
Make more room in your life for quiet. Read before bed, instead of surfing or chatting or sharing that one last trivial bit of forgettable fluff.
Enquieten your soul, so you can really begin to hear and listen to yourself, and nature, and for the voice of the Lord.. that still small voice which is paved over by the avalanche of modern noise, that needy neighbour or family member or stranger who vanishes behind the distractions.
Like any overpowering addiction, it may be painful and take some time to wean yourself away from constant technophilia and hollow ‘connectedness’. Then, try to help your kids, family, friends, co-workers. Shhhh. Listen.
So saith,
Wrecking balls, downtown construction
Bottles breaking, jukebox buzzing
Cardboard sign says “The Lord is Coming”
Tick, tick, tock
Rumors turn the mills back home
Parking lot kids with the speakers blown
We didn’t turn it on but we can’t turn it off, off, off
Sometimes I wonder how did we get here
Seems like all we ever hear is noise
Yeah we scream, yeah we shout ’til we don’t have a voice
In the streets, in the crowds, it ain’t nothing but noise
Drowning out all the dreams of this Tennessee boy
Just tryna be heard over all this noise
24 hour television, get so loud that no one listens
Sex and money and politicians talk, talk, talk
But there really ain’t no conversation
Ain’t nothing left to the imagination
Trapped in our phones and we can’t make it stop, stop this noise
Yeah we scream, yeah we shout ’til we don’t have a voice
In the streets, in the crowds, it ain’t nothing but noise
Drowning out all the dreams of this Tennessee boy
Just tryna be heard in all this noise
Every room, every house, every shade of noise
All the floors, all the walls, they all shake with noise
We can’t sleep, we can’t think, can’t escape the noise
We can’t take the noise, so we just make noise
Yeah we scream, yeah we shout ’til we don’t have a voice
In the streets, in the crowds, it ain’t nothing but noise
Drowning out all the dreams of this Tennessee boy
Just tryna be heard in all this noise
All this noise
Can’t take the noise
Can’t take the noise
Can’t stand the noise
Can’t take the noise