Dear You,
While on a whale-watching excursion out of Plymouth, Massachusetts, several years ago, I observed at the back of the vessel a man flanked by two boys, each engrossed in a paperback book. Since they were dressed similarly and bore resemblances to each other, I took them for father and sons. We had been out of sight of shore for over an hour already, with another hour to go before reaching the Stellwagen Banks, where the whales most likely were to be seen.
I looked around at the other passengers -- some in quiet conversation, others fiddling with camera equipment, quite a few with portable listening devices and nodding or tapping to music flowing from headsets, and not a few who were just staring at the vacant seascape. Here and there was someone else looking at print: the tour brochure, a magazine . . . but I saw only those three with books. In the years since, I have observed this same situation in a variety of public places.
How to explain this loss of the habit of reading? (An exegesis, no doubt, too lengthy for this space!) Kosinski called Americans a "nation of videots" and Mencken sneeringly invented decades earlier "Boobus Americanus." If those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, I think those who aren't readers cannot be very good citizens -- certainly not in a democracy, which can be sustained only by people of reason.
I think of those three readers afloat in the Atlantic, just a few years before their fellow Americans -- those who managed to get to the polls at all! -- voted into office a man who can scarcely read his own teleprompter, and who, with little sense of, and no regard for, history, has so damaged our country that it will be years undoing him if at all. Incredibly, We, the People, returned to the polls and elected him again!
Wasn't anyone reading?
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