The Walking Dead 3

Remember the Sony Walkman? And it's various knock-offs? They predate the Discman, for CD's and the MP3 player which of course is the au courante personal listening device on which you can upload all the music you want from the internet while starving professional musicians, since you're getting it for free. The Walkman, of course, was loaded with tapes. Remember tapes? Then you must be at least forty or older. I had a Walkman knockoff, I can't remember the brand name, back in the early nineties. I didn't use it much. I found it too distracting. I have always preferred to interact with my environment, not ignore it. I don't know why. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. But as much as I love music, I have never needed or wanted someone else's tunes playing in my ear twenty four hours a day. Not even four hours a day. I simply don't have that empty place in my soul that has to be filled up with music and distraction. I love music, especially classical and especially Baroque and Renaissance music. But I also like to hear what's going on around me. But why don't I need to be constantly listening to music? Well, I actually wonder about those who are so afraid of silence, so afraid of their own inner voice and inner void, that they can't bear to live without it. What is wrong with those people? They can't live without this constant noise, from rock, pop, rap and other stars, whom they elevate to the status of gods, mere mortals, flawed human beings like ourselves, though perhaps talented human beings with incredible marketing and self-promotion savvy. So, the emptiness of the masses, their collective spiritual and moral vacuity, makes them all sitting targets for grandiose, and talented narcissists and their agents and promoters, because truckloads of cash stand to be made off the adulation of the vacuous and gormless fans. And this is all because we are the Walking Dead. We have no soul, no substance, we are spiritually empty shells of humanity. This could be blamed on a lot of things, and I think that the erosion of religion and belief in God does play a role here. There is nothing in secular atheism that is going to address that soul-emptiness that has come to mark us, and to make us marks for marketing greed and genius. It doesn't matter where you go: on the sidewalk, in the mall, the grocery store, in coffee shops, on transit, in their cars, even walking on forest trails, you will find them all plugged into their private, personal listening device. It is particularly sad seeing this in the woods. There are so many lovely and subtle sounds in the forest: the different birds, songbirds, ravens and eagles, the wind in the trees, and the rustle of leaves and branches, such things as shouldn't need an artificial soundtrack. But so many people invest so much of themselves, their identity and their soul into their music gods, and this has become a serious idolatry. By default, we have sold ourselves to the lowest bidder, all because God no longer matters to us, all because we have opted through our own arrogant self-will, to detach ourselves from the very source of life that upholds, nourishes and sustains us, and as trade-off we have opted for the sounds and noises emitted by flawed human beings, every bit as fallible and wounded as ourselves, only a bit more arrogant, and because of our undiscerning worship of such talented fools, all the richer and greedier than the rest of us. And this is the state religion of Zombie Nation.