Overwhelmed? It’s not an uncommon experience, and it has two points of origin: One external and the other internal.
First, an anecdote. Called to Harrisburg in the early 2000s by a young state representative, I was asked to update some research I had previously done for the Commonwealth. The nature of the research is irrelevant here, but the story of the meeting isn’t. I found myself in the office of an energetic young man enthused to make a difference in his state, if not the world. He told me that he went into public office with a desire to change the status quo of inordinate waste and inefficiency. What he found, however, was a system so large and so out of control, that any efforts he made to reduce wasteful spending was offset by an in-place tradition that gave representatives carte blanche to spend as they desired, particularly to spend as they desired to influence their voters. In short, he was overwhelmed by a system that dampened his effectiveness if not his spirit. Nevertheless, in the face of the realities imposed by a long tradition, he maintained his personal enthusiasm and his willingness to tilt at the windmill grinding tax money into favors for votes.
Second a broadcast report: The Learning Channel interviewed the Eisenbergs of Indiana, Pennsylvania. I saw the bit as I waited for the coffee to brew. Normally, I would have switched past such a story, but I was caught by the OVERWHELMING number of Santas the family had collected inside their small home. I missed the number, but I’m guessing thousands, stuffed and ceramic, mechanical and electric. As the cameraman swept the scenes, I saw little room for human habitation, their house reduced to mere passageways. If someone had made a stuffed or ceramic statue, the Eisenbergs were sure to have a copy. What caught my eye was the opening scene I observed, not probably the beginning of the piece, with the Eisenbergs walking with a contractor across their lawn to show him a chimney they wanted widened. They were intent on displaying a big Santa on the outside of their house, and they were willing, it seems, to go to great expense to add construction costs. Their obsession—which they freely admit to on camera—reminded me of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs (Les Chaises), a play in the genre Theatre of the Absurd. Briefly put, in Ionesco’s drama, two elderly people await an audience for their message to future generations. Instead of an audience only chairs begin to fill the stage, and the one person, an interlocuter, they depend upon to convey their significant discovery about life to posterity has aphasia. In other words, no message gets passed on in a world of overwhelming materialism. A deaf-mute interlocuter delivers no coherent message to the imagined audience filling the actually empty chairs.
Is there any lesson for some interlocuter to pass on about a young state representative overwhelmed by the rampant spending of taxes over which he apparently had no control and a couple overwhelmed by Santa Clauses over which they had control? Is it a lesson in folly? In materialism? In affluence gone wrong? Is it a lesson about the modern world specifically or the human world as it has always been, one in which human practices overwhelm other humans or one in which humans overwhelm themselves by practices they can, in fact, control?
I’m not too much different from the Eisenbergs, and maybe you aren’t either. Nor am I different from the spending machine of government giddy on tax wealth and free from accountability. Want a simple example? Look at your smartphone photos. No, not just some of them, but the hundreds and thousands you have taken. Then look at those old photo collections stored somewhere, attic, basement, closet, den. Look at all of them. I won’t even mention (a sure sign that I’m about to) any objects on mantels, shelves, or walls, all collected bit by bit like the grains of eroded mountains deposited in nearby repository basins, the houses in which sediments lithify.
Then ask yourself: Do I have a message I want posterity to hear?
First, an anecdote. Called to Harrisburg in the early 2000s by a young state representative, I was asked to update some research I had previously done for the Commonwealth. The nature of the research is irrelevant here, but the story of the meeting isn’t. I found myself in the office of an energetic young man enthused to make a difference in his state, if not the world. He told me that he went into public office with a desire to change the status quo of inordinate waste and inefficiency. What he found, however, was a system so large and so out of control, that any efforts he made to reduce wasteful spending was offset by an in-place tradition that gave representatives carte blanche to spend as they desired, particularly to spend as they desired to influence their voters. In short, he was overwhelmed by a system that dampened his effectiveness if not his spirit. Nevertheless, in the face of the realities imposed by a long tradition, he maintained his personal enthusiasm and his willingness to tilt at the windmill grinding tax money into favors for votes.
Second a broadcast report: The Learning Channel interviewed the Eisenbergs of Indiana, Pennsylvania. I saw the bit as I waited for the coffee to brew. Normally, I would have switched past such a story, but I was caught by the OVERWHELMING number of Santas the family had collected inside their small home. I missed the number, but I’m guessing thousands, stuffed and ceramic, mechanical and electric. As the cameraman swept the scenes, I saw little room for human habitation, their house reduced to mere passageways. If someone had made a stuffed or ceramic statue, the Eisenbergs were sure to have a copy. What caught my eye was the opening scene I observed, not probably the beginning of the piece, with the Eisenbergs walking with a contractor across their lawn to show him a chimney they wanted widened. They were intent on displaying a big Santa on the outside of their house, and they were willing, it seems, to go to great expense to add construction costs. Their obsession—which they freely admit to on camera—reminded me of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs (Les Chaises), a play in the genre Theatre of the Absurd. Briefly put, in Ionesco’s drama, two elderly people await an audience for their message to future generations. Instead of an audience only chairs begin to fill the stage, and the one person, an interlocuter, they depend upon to convey their significant discovery about life to posterity has aphasia. In other words, no message gets passed on in a world of overwhelming materialism. A deaf-mute interlocuter delivers no coherent message to the imagined audience filling the actually empty chairs.
Is there any lesson for some interlocuter to pass on about a young state representative overwhelmed by the rampant spending of taxes over which he apparently had no control and a couple overwhelmed by Santa Clauses over which they had control? Is it a lesson in folly? In materialism? In affluence gone wrong? Is it a lesson about the modern world specifically or the human world as it has always been, one in which human practices overwhelm other humans or one in which humans overwhelm themselves by practices they can, in fact, control?
I’m not too much different from the Eisenbergs, and maybe you aren’t either. Nor am I different from the spending machine of government giddy on tax wealth and free from accountability. Want a simple example? Look at your smartphone photos. No, not just some of them, but the hundreds and thousands you have taken. Then look at those old photo collections stored somewhere, attic, basement, closet, den. Look at all of them. I won’t even mention (a sure sign that I’m about to) any objects on mantels, shelves, or walls, all collected bit by bit like the grains of eroded mountains deposited in nearby repository basins, the houses in which sediments lithify.
Then ask yourself: Do I have a message I want posterity to hear?
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