What are we talking about if anything?

I remember the family dinners at my grandparents when I was kid on various holidays. The women would gather in the kitchen and dining room and talk about women stuff; whatever that was. And the guys would gather in the living room and listen to whatever sports event was going on. And they would talk with great knowledge about the players their playing statistics, rules of the games etc. They were absolutely experts on these sports. The exception was my particular family who really didn’t know diddly squat about any of them. It’s like that in family and friend gatherings all over the country. I am absolutely amazed at the knowledge base of most men when it comes to sports knowledge. They read the sports pages religiously and follow the games on TV and radio; veritable encyclopedias of sports information; makes me feel rather stupid. I like watching most sports well enough but I would flunk any sports test around even in the sports I participate, like golf.

Then I got to thinking about the founding fathers of our country. When they all got together, what did they talk about? There weren’t any national sports and I doubt very few local sports. My guess is they talked about the events and interests of the day. For example what John Locke was writing about in term of politics in Europe and the various philosophies and things going on; the critiques of Alexander de Tocqueville on the democratic experience, the economic philosophies of Adam Smith. These discourses along with the mundane things of life we all talk about. And I imagine they talked about religion and the beliefs or lack of them. Most of the founding fathers were deists, not exactly the orthodox religious of the day. My point is they talked about thing of more important and weight in and for society. The lifestyles of those times just naturally led folk to more philosophical thought. And if you read the letters and other writings of those days, they had much better vocabularies and more sophisticated way of phrasing in comparison to now. Their thought processes were more through and thoughtful. Today you have to say everything in 140 on Twitter or 240 on Facebook; rendering and limiting thought processes significantly. Just ask the college professors of today’s era about students ability to write term paper of any length.

Newspaper are a dying media and they write of limited length as well. Magazines have the ability to develop ideas more thoroughly but for every issue of Times, Newsweek, Forbes and the like thousands of People and US and magazines of similar ilk are purchased. And as for the TV and radio media, they talk in such limited sound bites it’s hard to learn much of anything. Then there are the pretend new networks like Fox News and MNBC (refuse to listen either.) We are a post literate nation.

I do feel better about the internet where on my home page I have links to the NY Times, the Huffington Post, Supply Side Economics, Christian Century and various blogs, etc. that I can check and find articles of length and of substance. The trick is figured out what is crap and what is solid info.

The point I am making is that our democracy is suffering from a lack of significant discussion of the greater issues of the day and we have less and less ability to discuss material with civility, and with diligence. The founding fathers were dealing with how to run an emerging country with a brand new radical form of government, important stuff that by nature required a good deal of reflective thought and diligent research and dialogue.