All of the items on the above list can be laid squarely at the feet of "our" celebration of the shallow over the substantial. Our own thrill-seeking, channel-surfing, short-attention-span PlayStation-mentality search for the Big Bang of inaneity has brought us to this place. We know nothing about the geography of this little blue marble and less about the investigation of what our common humanity is all about --- important ideas that our forebears gave their lives (sometimes literally) to bequeathe to us! But every idiot on the street can tell you what Britney Spears is up to and what's on the sale at Burger King this week!!!

Damn the shallow!

All of this shallowness, and its celebration, has made us a nation trapped in some hellish perpetual adolescence. We run like frightened rabbits from the very idea of grappling with things like our crumbling economy, our shambles of health care and educational systems, and now -- yes, the fact that people in the world might consider us greedy and arrogant and therefore not like Americans very much.

"Oh, boo-hoo, why don't they like us?"

Grow up! If you ever had a teenaged son or daughter, you know that they're not very likeable people. They're not. Their major preoccupations are being popular in one clique or another, having money for games and parties and sporting events, and being able to afford the "right" uniform for their clique of cho ice, be it nerdy button-down shirts or gothic black trench coats. They don't know from balancing a household budget o r holding down a job and believe they are both intellectually superior to their parents and most of their peers and physically invulnerable. Adolescents expect to be forever young, healthy and that they are immortal. Who in their right minds could like a shallow, blindered person like that?

That's why we have the old saw about adolescence being a form of insanity --- and America today, with its celebration of the shallow is nothing if not the teenager of the world of nations.

I won't even start on the high school Pep Club pap that's being foisted upon us as "patriotism."

Damn the shallow.

In my angry heart of hearts I continue to believe that there are people out there who know the difference between form and substance, between sound-and-fury and substantive planning and implementation.

But you have to work harder every day, it seems to me, to separate the wheat from the hip-deep chaff we are drowning in. We need more workers on this threshing room floor, even if they're angry workers like me.

We need to tell the schlock-meisters, "Busted!" once and for all and get down to the substantial, adult business of being a nation of responsible and engaged citizens. As another columnist wrote here last week, this is an election year.

We have a choice once again: engage with our lives and do the hard work of building something new or disengage, tune-out and wait for some disaster to force another futile pep rally.

The opposite of Love is not Hate. The opposite of Love is Disinterest.

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