In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), educator Neil Postman wrote a masterful work about the American decline of public conversations and civic intimacy that normally characterized involved citizenry. Likening our “infotainment” system of television to an electronic amusement park, he castigated the “talking hairdos,” the incessant interruptions of commercials, and the decline of well-written text in favor of visuals to “sell” lifestyles. The phrase “now, this” was generated to shift from one topic to another, without any logical or factual linkage, and has, I believe, exacerbated the trend towards attention deficit disorder.

Postman’s fundamental thesis is that America is akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the masses are addicted to soma, their entertainment drug. TV and smartphones are today’s soma, and people are far less capable of engaging in, and maintaining, sustainable adult relationships, because they lack the tools necessary to build them.

Moreover, the critical-thinking qualities that help us to build meaningful socio-political and economic constructs are mostly missing.

So the “Kens and Barbies” of the suburbs, and the “Jolenes and Bubbas” of the rural South, are ensconced in their own little worlds of distractions from the urgent needs of our world — fighting the global climate crisis; fighting for universal health care; fighting for a decent education system; fighting for economic justice; fighting for infrastructure — and thus don’t know what they should do, or how they should do it, to leave the world, this country, this state, this county, this city/town, or this neighborhood in a better condition than when they found it.

And that’s because we’ve been so busy, “amusing ourselves to death….”