Thought Provoker

People have asked me why I enjoy the daily morning newspaper. It's apparently a lost art in our increasingly digital age.

I've thought about it, too. I mean, it's about a half and hour of the day I could get back and do something more productive, I suppose. To a certain degree, I like keeping up with world events...and I like reading about them rather than watching the news. In fact, I'll often hit different newspapers in different parts of the country with different political leanings to make some sort of informed opinions. There's something to a routine that keeps me centered.

But the primary benefit to me personally is because that particular ritual engages my brain. Something, somewhere, somehow grabs my attention and causes me to analyze what I believe against what is happening. I guess it's like turning on my worldview filter.

Here's what did it today, from Miami Herald columnist Harold Pitts. He was discussing how, for a country that values freedom so much, we tend to squelch it regarding individual day-in, day-out action. His test-case was a friend of his that was raised in communist-led Estonia...of which you can get the entire op-ed article here. But here's the snippet that got my brain engaged today:

"But the plain truth is, when Anna said she doesn't find this country to be especially free, it was Anna talking. Granted, her complaint is hardly new. People often grouse about the lack of freedom in the land of the free.

Americans, she said, love to trumpet their freedom. But it's hard to square that with political correctness that straitjackets communication for fear of giving unintended offense, hair-trigger litigiousness that requires major corporations to treat customers ("Caution: Coffee is hot") like idiots for fear of being sued, zero-tolerance policies and mandatory sentencing guidelines that remove human judgment from human encounters for fear of rendering unequal justice.

You do not have to agree that Americans compare unfavorably with the dull and dispirited Party men and women of a generation ago – I don't – to believe Anna has a point. A nation of iconoclasts and originals seems hellbent on becoming a nation of hall monitors. A nation born in revolution has lived to see revolution neutered and co-opted. So much so that even that which poses as a threat to the status quo (hip-hop, for example) nowadays has commercial sponsorship and corporate tie-ins.

It's hard to imagine an Elvis Presley happening in such an era. Or a Malcolm X, a Miles Davis, a Marlon Brando, a Bob Dylan, a Walt Disney, a Betty Friedan or any of the other American originals who pole-axed the 20th century. After all, originality is anathema to uniformity and, make no mistake, uniformity is what we're talking about here, the campaign to regulate language, law, culture and every other aspect of human intercourse in the hope of thereby removing from that intercourse every hint of risk or danger of unequal treatment.

And if this impulse toward uniformity sounds noble in theory, what it leads to in practice is kids kicked out of school because Midol violates the zero-tolerance drug policy or a guy getting 25 to life because the pizza he stole violates the three-strike law."

Have at it, patrons.