Sure signs of an uncivilized age in Daydreaming on the Porch

One of the surest signs of the debasement and rejection of civility today is the ceaseless, deliberate proliferation of noise in our society. We are bombarded by it constantly: Loud TVs; trucks; military jets and commercial aircraft; and booming, terrifying Harleys, and speed-freak, revved-up smaller motorcycles, racing up and down city streets with impunity, endangering lives and emitting the most obscenely high-decibel noise conceivable to the unprotected ear.

I am sensitive to noise and suffered hearing damage years ago. I often have to cover my ears when I am exposed to this. But more than anything it makes me sad and angry that we have come to a point where this is even tolerated, instead of being banned.

Miserably selfish little nobodies create this motorcycle noise on our streets. One would have to have a quite minuscule IQ and sense of self-worth to think this barbaric noise-generating activity is in any way cool, macho, daring or rebellious. It’s the very opposite of these things.

And then there’s the jacked up 5-ton pickup trucks and vehicles devoid of mufflers with their earth-rattling car stereos with bass so loud the ground vibrates underneath, and whose occupants inhabit a lost hearing twilight world they will soon enough pay dearly for, so thoughtless of themselves and others.

We live with noise, and I mean the grossest, most offensive kind. Every day where I live huge transport jets fly low overhead on their way to the Air Force base, obliterating for long moments any sense of tranquility of thought or purpose. Loud delivery, and all manner of other trucks, rattle the nerves and ears. A pile-driver destroyed any peace and quiet from where I sat this afternoon writing this, creating a loud and steady, pounding noise.

Just look at what we’ve come to. Huge, powerful, noisy and polluting engines pulling trucks that are hauling thousand of pounds of beer to slake the thirst and numb the brains of college students. Buses that need silencing mufflers. Car with no mufflers.

As I sat in the relative quiet of the garden in back of the student center at the college downtown, I only occasionally noticed the traffic on the street a hundred feet or so away. Instead, I enjoyed the sound of a solitary cricket in an azalea bush. He is one of the last to sing his song before the frosts of winter arrive. The cricket and the mockingbird, which was singing at that time also.

One wonders if the brain-dead and soon-to-be-deaf operators of those soul-deadening machines know anything of the virtues of true quiet. Their dying ears can’t hear and their hearts have become hardened to the possibility that a more peaceful world that would exist if their noise and chaos did not exist.

The noisemakers will never comprehend what a terrible price some of us must pay for their dancing around the vortex of the massive urban chaos they produce and revel in, day in and day out. Ad infinitum. Pathetic!