There’s a commercial circulating on the airwaves right now with a celebrity calling for more, limitless wireless data service. The idea is that, with unlimited data on their devices, people can enjoy more entertainment on the go.
“More romance,” he claims as he walks through throngs of couples re-enacting the beach scene in “From Here to Eternity.”
“If you’re in to that kind of thing.”
“More punching robots,” he espouses as he pummels and pounds his way through a plethora of automatons.
Movies. Check. News. Check. Entertainment. Check.
“More yelling!” he calls out from the center square of a generic “news magazine” show setup of guests.
“But, what are we yelling about guys?”

…
And that shuts ‘em up. Because that, you see, is the question.
Regardless of where you look and listen, on television or radio, that seems to be all people are doing today. Yelling. At the tops of their lungs, often over each other, usually incoherently.
Yelling about how he’s a dirty so-and-so or she’s a crook. Screaming that she’s a liar and he’s an idiot and they’re all going to lead us down the rocky road to … blah, blah, blah.
There are a couple of problems with that formula, though. If all we do is yell and scream we aren’t listening and we’re not learning. And, if we’re not learning, we certainly aren’t solving the problems facing our country today.
It’s often been opined that a closed mind is the greatest impediment to learning. A corollary of that could be that a mind sure that it is right is also anathema to the acquisition of knowledge.
And we’re in an interesting position today where knowledge and learning are almost becoming bad words, things to be avoided. We have professional athletes (why people care what professional athletes think is a curiosity in itself) claiming they doubt the Earth is round.
We have the people charged with protecting our environmental future who believe climate change is a great global conspiracy. We have the man who’s newly in charge of agriculture policy claiming you can have school lunch that’s either tasty or nutritious, but not both, so why make it nutritious?
Throw out those pesky nutrition guidelines that have done more in recent years to combat juvenile obesity than any 10 exercise programs you’d care to name have done by themselves. Confronted with this type of information, the deniers effectively are sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting “lalalalalalalal.”
So, we’ve figured out what the question is. But what is the answer? If we don’t take the time to stop and listen, how are we ever going to solve the problems facing the world today?
There’s an old quotation, usually attributed to both Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, which begins to hint at a solution:
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”