I have been dodging the issue of writing very well for way too long. I have a million of excuses of course, but that is all they are, and they are only as real as I allow them to be. It is time to transcend.
One if the issues I have been contemplating is the lack of literacy in our society. (And you wonder why I am suddenly so inclined to not write.) So many Americans are illiterate it is no longer only a tragedy for the individuals but indeed for our whole society as well. Television, radio, movies, billboards, and mass media surround us constantly. Indeed these things are taking are all feeding into the over stimulation and instant self gratification needs of the X and Y generations. But could they be taking over our collective lives, our value and potentials as a society? Are they perhaps becoming to invasive? And how much meaning do they really have anymore?
I must admit that I am a news buff. I could watch an hour of news morning, noon, and night. I did when I had cable. I never had the cable turned on when I moved last. And I am glad of this for no other reason that I simply have started to turn the television off whenever the nightly crap, and most of it is except PBS, comes on. Yes, as the seniors at the senior center where I work call it, television is indeed the "idiot box".
The information age has brought many wonderful things to our society. We can more freely keep in touch with friends across the nation or across the world, and it is simple. We can access any information we need or want almost instantaneously. I can email files of my current works in progress to friends for critique, anytime, and get a timely response. It makes life so much easier, or should I say faster.
What worries me about all this, and getting back to my original point, is who all this mass media is truly serving.
When I was serving in AmeriCorps (1997-1999) my pet project became youth illiteracy. This was due largely to the discovery that a frighteningly large percentage of the seventh and eighth graders I was working with could not read! Some simply read far below grade level, others were visibly frightened by the text tiles found in an ordinary Scrabble for Juniors TM game. I spent my second year of AmeriCorps researching illiteracy with a focus on teen illiteracy. At the time the numbers I was finding said that forty percent of the American population was illiterate, and a higher percentage were functionally illiterate. Being a long time lover of books and a poet I found it very difficult to understand how it was possible to be illiterate in a modern society. An under funded and overly test-score focused educational system may be partly to blame. (Note this is due to policy failures not teaching failures.) We can not hold children responsible for underachieving in school because it is folly to expect them to succeed when they cannot read the instructions on their homework!
Nonetheless it is not unfathomable that illiteracy rates are now higher than those I previously mentioned. And, thus, it is the status of the illiterate American citizen that concerns me. I often remember the children I worked with. I wonder where they are now and what life holds for all their imagination, innovation, honest motivations and intentions. I especially wonder what the children who could not read are doing. They most certainly have not disappeared. They are still so young, I can not accept that they have turned into compost for the next generation of urban decay dwellers. Their dreams were so strong they could not have given up yet.
What do the illiterate do in today's world? How are they to become heard in our increasingly (?) text society? How are all to be included in the information age? This question is paramount to the future of human dignity in our society. And it encompasses more than just the illiterate and functionally illiterate who dwell amougst us. (Yes, they live in your neighborhood--in suburbia. Don't believe it? How far away is the nearest chain bookstore? How well stocked, current, and diverse is your branch library?) It includes the poor and the elderly. How are the impoverished members of our society to find the time, much less the public resources to learn the internet, when their schools and libraries are grossly under funded, if not closed, and they must work two or three jobs to feed their families modestly? How many of the elderly are inclined to communicate via internet? Granted the numbers are growing, as the baby boomers retire, however others, perhaps half of the greatest generation, are not interested. But how are they to engage our society, our justice system, our political system, our system of idea sharing, and socializing if they cannot converse via the Internet with the rest of us? Are our prisons equipped to train our prisoners the computer skills they will need to obtain a job when they reenter society? What happens to those members of our society who are not or cannot interface with the text portion of our society? How can we maintain their human dignity if we continue to move towards a society that provides them with more entertainment opportunities than involvement or discourse opportunities? Have we become such a technological based society that those without technological resources or ability have become functionally illiterate? How do, or can, we reach those without the means to touch us? Or was that the idea?
If you are still wondering if this something we really have to worry about. Tell me, when a society changes has to its "walk" / "don't walk" street signs to flash a walking man and a hand motioning to stop, what do you think?
Yes, I worry about those who our society seems to have less and less for. I most likely will never know what became of any of the youth I worked with; although I still live in the neighborhood I served I have yet to run into anyone of them. But I regularly wonder how they have grown. I worry about how the world is treating them. I worry about them believing they are not heard, or worse untouchable. As youths they did trash pick-ups, visited the elderly and the homeless, and painted over graffiti to make the neighborhood stronger and better. If they are doing nothing more than contributing to their community, in some small way, today I would say they are successful beyond measure. Despite what their paycheck, educational, or social standing would suggest. For even those we may have disenfranchised in this new age have more ability to affect change then the powers that be believe. And as such they have greater power then they can imagine.
That is my Hope.
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