Looting my library

Moving is no fun. When you have to move your whole library, books become burden.

Today, I started that process. Yet I found myself surprised by joy. The joy of looting, of rediscovering why I had picked a certain title over the others. In short, new found love with authors and writings that have been there all along.

Scribes and scrolls, typesetting and typewriting, tweet and shout.

The little bird, Tweeting in Musk’s ears.

Our attention-span has never been shorter ( trending tweets as oppose to a whole library ). ”Organizing the world’s information” . As if we’re gods. Everything there is to be known, while in-fact our very existence are mere bylines or barely mentioned in passing.

Yet here we are: Multi-channeled, multi-media….The medium is the message. The tweet is the trend.

What once feared as “Future Shock” is now here. A divided country, whose fault-line is so obvious (No more Presidential debates, says the RNC). Nixon vs Kennedy, the networks vs their mass audience (before being un-massed by Culture Wars).

Narrow casting: talk-radio, blogosphere, tweet and trend. Preach to the choir, play to the base.

War and famine. The poor will always be with you (hence, Be Mary, not Martha).

Pay attention to the Logos, the Word, the story and the speech.

Be not like Audrey Hepburn or Mother Theresa. For the poor shall always be with you.

God wants you to be rich (BTW, share your wealth, give me some…at least 10%). Just lie your way through.

Mega phone and mega Church. Co-opting the world into the Church (calling it “Club”) and not as was originally called to be In but not Of it.

On the eve of Good Friday, the plan was to sell out his Carpenter-turned -Influencer, like a Godfather’s plot i.e. planting a gun behind the restaurant toilet – pointing him out, with plausible – not without a price – deniability, leaving him to die by a hammer i.e. wooden crucifixion.

We are all Judas and Peters. betrayers or deniers after leveraging our “friending” to extract a few bucks (at least Facebook did).

True friend? Debatable. Real enemy? Certainly.

We all fall short, everyday, in every way.

Just look at Zelensky. Forged in crisis. Standing still. Against the wind. Born, battered but not beaten in battle.

Real leader with real followers although I am sure there must be a few Judas selling him out.

But so far, his hiding has yet been bombed (60 minutes interview shows him OK).

Back to my more selected library.

This time, I vow to keep more History titles, like Robert Caro, Walter Lippmann than mystery’s.

More poetry (if not now, when).

And fewer “Future Shock” types. After all, we’re living out that “shock”. Need I list all the crises since the televised Kennedy-Nixon debate e.g. Bay of Pigs, assassination, rise and fall of “curtain” and “wall”, Great Society and Social Media (which put a nail on the Mass media coffin with start-stop- pause content.)

So much thrown at us. The more we are connected digitally, the less we are in control (hardly push “Pause”), the more shallow our connections. Scribes and scrolls, thesis and teleprompter. None of that offers an additional grain of wisdom. Bombarded in all sides with news, more fake than real. Infotainment and entertainment. Self-Prescribed and self-appointed experts and expats.

That said, should I leave behind my library or take them all with me. To rinse and repeat until my next overhaul. Time for self-care and compassion.

Meanwhile it’s fun to loot my own library. The books are now on the floor, on the shelves, or the table. Boxed or un-boxed – all screaming “Take me with you”. “I want to inform, entertain, enlighten you”. Befriend me. Unfriend me not.

Wisdom doesn’t come easy. First you must seek it, then earn it before dispensing it. Rodin’s “The Thinker” perhaps was pondering the same, like Steve Jobs “If you know you only have that much time left to live, shouldn’t you go ahead and do the very thing your heart has always so desired”.

The Biblical story we remember this day presents two responses: selling out or denying (Judas and Peter). Both followed the money/popular trending e.g. joining the crowd when stones turned into bread or when the donkey triumphantly rode on Palm Sunday.

Solomon would advise us to pick one over the other, just to paint us into a binary decision (The real mother, the one who has true love, would give up her rightful claim just to see her child live). True vs fake, truth vs falsehood (hypocrisy).

TIME has a piece by Richard Cohen about re-written History. Most time, today’s Peter was yesterday’s Judas (got rich on schemes, then taking up the high road to Sainthood). Pulling a Kushner right through the loopholes of the law. If any decency and conscience left, we should at least see our current Pope continue his round of public apologies for all the wrong done in Canadian boarding schools – atrocities committed in the name of our greatest Influencer, who had no need for a Twitter feed to spread his parables.

Come to think of it, the only wisdom I need to preserve is whatever our Lord was scribbling on the ground while people casting stones at the adulterous woman.

Judge not.