We are all talking past one another, in every possible configuration. Republicans and Democrats. Republicans and Republicans. Democrats and Democrats. And this cacophony of the unlistening extends far past American politics. Race. Religion. Nationality. Ideology. Every class of person there is has something to say... and they no longer even care who is or is not listening.
Talking is too soft a term for the din of melodies without harmony.
We are shouting ourselves deaf into a darkness we do not even notice is there, for we are all equally blind when we face the future.
Why? Why shout? Who are we shouting for?
I should think it obvious... except I never noticed it before, for I was shouting deaf and blind into the dark as well.
We are struggling, one and all, as people have throughout every age, to find the stories, the myths, the legends that give us an emotive sense of purpose and place. That tell us something informative about the world in which we live... and at the same time give us an identity on which to hang our lives.
Every age has its myths - why? Because humans go mad without them.
The purpose of legends in every society is to direct emotional and mental focus on key goals and tasks that, supposedly, the given culture needs for its members to embrace. It doesn't matter if the stories are perfectly true - they generally aren't, and this is generally recognized even by close adherents to them. After all, they're stories -fairy tales, myths and legends.
However, no set of fables and beliefs last forever. The land itself changes over time, and in many cases the customs and available technologies of its inhabitants - and the makeup of the inhabitants themselves - alter as well.
So the stories are under constant pressure to change - to update to reflect new conditions, new languages, new voices, new understandings of how the objective reality in which things like hunting game, finding pasturage, digging wells, planting crops and making tools take place.
Now, fast forward across a succession of steps in sociological and technological progress, to a year labeled 2010 AD in the common calendar that the Earth has currently adopted.
None of the old legends work anymore, not as originally written.
And I mean more than religious beliefs, more than ideologies, more than nationalistic and other cultural totems and fetishes and comfort foods.
They're all obsolete, and this has happened throughout the lives of the current generation's grandparents, since the time of their grandparents' grandparents.
But it falls to this generation to write the new legends.
And we are. All of us. All at once.
We sense it, left and right, authoritarian and libertarian, believer and unbeliever in every type of faith, cause and concern you can pick out of a Google search.
There is so much information out there, objective knowledge about the universe, the dynamic conditions that face our environment, our economy and our polity.
You could lose yourself - lose your identity and go truly mad - attempting to understand every minutiae.
You could likewise go mad flying into the comforting embrace of old legends, or attempts to rewrite them and shoehorn them into your countenance of the world, to make yourself as comfortable as possible believing only what you want to belief.
Anything, any desperate thing, to hold onto an old identity...or fashion a newer, stronger one out of the pieces that reality has left of once-strong legends, tales, myths, fables, formerly-proven-now-refuted facts, official histories and belief systems.
For we are in an age where we know how the universe actually functions, to a depth and scale and precision impossible for scientists of a mere quarter-century ago to grasp.
And the heart of most of our legends date back thousands of years. Yet even ones from a few centuries prior show egregious flaws.
We are in an age of innovation, have been for centuries.
And now we are in the process of processing this transformation.
The world is much more complex. The interaction of levels of reality only now beginning to be grasped.
And just in the nick of time, if we home in, as swiftly and as wisely as we can, on the new legends that these information-rich times require.
For we cannot, as many seem to wish, un-learn the nature of reality, including the power that human activity has to hurt not just other people, not just other forms of life, but the viability of this planet to support life at all.
We are casting about, shouting, deaf and blind to future, for stories that make sense...
...legends that we can all hear...
...tales of place and purpose that, like torches, will light our way back together...
..but only if we choose these new legends well.
For as is the case with ages of innovation, not every idea is a good one.
So it falls on this generation - some who have seen 70 years and more, some who have not yet seen seven, and all those multitudes in between - to write and choose the new legends.
May they be legends of our rise to the next level of civilization.
Otherwise they shall surely be legends of the fall of everything of any kind on this planet.
And that is why we all talk past one another.
We're busy choosing our way through the confusion.
I hope - I dare say I pray - that we find a wise and well-lit way forward before it is too late.