iPod-secluded
society making too much noise
Bradley Zint
We all should enjoy some complete
silence. We should all experience some
peaceful solitude, a short or long getaway
from this urban Los Angeles hustle and
bustle.
In a society with seemingly more noise than ever before, the presence of silence
is becoming more and more rare. We start and end our day tuned into our noisy,
busy media. We turn on the radio to hear some ideologues babble on about the
stupidity of liberals or the shortsightedness of conservatives. We turn on the
television to hear the news, a passionate piece by Geraldo Rivera or something
from “Good Morning America.”
Nowadays we tune out the world and pop in two little white headphones from an
iPod into our ears. We distance ourselves to our respective musical abandons
from others who may be right next to us.
Mentally, however, we’re miles apart.
We’re constantly surrounded in some way with noise, noise, noise. Honking
cars, noisy neighbors, verbose professors, laundry machines or beer commercials,
to name a few, fight for the attention of our ears. In our secluded leave-me-alone-to-my-music
iPod society, the power of silence seems to be harder to find than lottery winners.
To quote Simon and Garfunkel, in today’s world there are too many “People
talking without speaking / People hearing without listening.” It doesn’t
have to be that way, nor should it.
We all deserve the sound of silence. We all should seek it and make it a daily
necessity.
But before I elaborate, I do not want to confuse my little allusion to classic
music with the infamous “awkward silence.” This type is not what
I’m referring to. I’m not advocating an escape to the uncomfortable
absence of dialogue.
What I’m talking about is the absence of unwanted sounds, an absence of
the cacophony of modern society so we can get back to something purer.
Call me crazy, but if I can walk outside and hear practically nothing, I’ll
feel content for the moment. If I can walk outside and hear only a few crickets
instead of police sirens chasing down some thug in LBC, airplanes landing in
the Long Beach Airport or bass-heavy Snoop Dogg next door, I’ll enjoy the
moment. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Nothing against Snoop and gin ‘n’ juice, but here in a city of half
a million people and a county of some 10 million souls, temporarily escaping
the noise is hard to do. But if we can, even for a moment, get away from this
overwhelming symphony of discord, it will surely be one more factor that will
prevent us from going insane in modern society. It will be one more factor keeping
us from going over the edge and becoming victims to the strife of society.
It becomes imperative then, in my estimation, to escape everything every once
in a while. Run away.
Run against the wind. Move wherever you need to go to get away from it all. Find
somewhere where modernization is replaced by something unchanged by man’s
society.
Fortunately for Californians, escaping to a variety of places is easy. The Golden
State provides options to which our tax dollars already contribute to: state
and national parks. These are great places to escape our society and enjoy something
different: trees not planned and planted by city planners, ground free of concrete,
real grass that isn’t sod and air that isn’t smog-ridden.
But most of all, you can enjoy the sound of silence that’s so difficult
to hear in our otherwise noisy world. Maybe if you’re lucky in your sound
of silence, you might even run into Mrs. Robinson at the Scarborough Fair.
Bradley Zint is a junior journalism and political science major and
the opinion editor of the Daily Forty-Niner.
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