Just when Tracey had managed to threaten, frighten and charm the FedEx driver into delivering our weekly box of groceries from Home Chef to the front porch instead of the barn, we got a new driver. We found our raw chicken on the ground, below the barn 200 feet from the house, full of ants and in a patch of poison ivy.
The driver claimed it was impossible to back his truck up our driveway – a spurious claim since tractor trailers and POD delivery trucks have made the trip; the propane delivery truck and the big UPS truck come regularly, and I have personally backed a trailer with six aluminum Grumman canoes behind a 15-passenger van up and down the same route many times.
There is nothing to prevent a pedestrian from carrying a box to our front door, at least since Cuthbert the Rooster left us.
We don’t intend to recount today the history of our troubles with rural delivery and the demise of quality and work ethic that has plagued our culture. Instead, let’s discuss what came next.
I filed a claim with FedEx, which refused accountability for their driver and referred me back to the shipper, which immediately issued a refund and will likely pursue their own claim. But I didn’t stop there. Like perhaps the majority of people now who experience a grievance, I took to social media to vent my frustration.
In my own defense, I attempted to wrap my rant in humor. Humor is the antidote to so many of the world’s problems. What troubles me is how easily and thoughtlessly I turned to social media to share a grievance with people who had no horse in the race and no ability to improve the situation. It was funny, and several people had similar experiences, and misery loves company – and nothing productive was achieved.
A spirit of discord permeates the age of information and penetrates to the roots of Western civilization like weed killer on a patch of poison ivy. Discord has always plagued humanity, but social media amplifies it beyond all sense of scale, and news pushers bait the public with crime, controversy, and misfortune, continuously sounding the alarm over unprecedented firestorms of high-stakes bombshells of backlash, and we spend our waking hours saturated in negativity.
We can debate for days on the nature of evil. The Church has some definitive ideas on the subject, but with my technical background, I find it useful to visualize the problem as a kind of broadcast frequency of discord, an ultra or subsonic frequency that we can’t hear but which is a constant irritant, like a collective tinnitus.
The results go beyond indigestion and restless sleep. We are becoming conditioned to accept discord as a natural state. Anger and rage are fashionable, thus we are less civil to our fellow citizens, even to our friends; more prone to lash out, cuss out, tell off. We are too comfortable sharing whatever pops into our heads without considering whether it is something we would truly want to own, and we say things that we can’t take back, things that cannot be unseen or unheard. This is a problem in a society that has also forgotten forgiveness.
History also clearly illustrates what happens to a people, a nation, even a civilization when discord persists long enough to overcome common denominators, common causes, and common decency. As for me, I think it’s time for a little “radio silence.”
Outside The Box 