collectedstoriesbookstore.com Blog

Our confidence in government is tested during election season.  Amid the attacks, counterattacks, innuendos, confabulations and all around petty bickering, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that elections mean something: that voting is an act of faith, if not always in our politicians, than in our community, our future, our democracy.

When I was 16, my boyfriend and I walked door-to-door on election night cajoling those who had not yet voted to exercise that right, if not for their own self interest, than for ours.  We were amazed at the number of people who stopped what they were doing—eating dinner, helping their children with homework—and went out and voted so that we could have a voice.

As a parent, voting means representing the goals and dreams of my own 16-year old son; and it reflects my best hope for his, and his family’s future.

We can’t put an end to negativity in politics—at least not today—but staying home enables those who spend their time demeaning and defaming, to win.  Voting is an act of optimism in the future and the best way to honor the sacrifice of those who fought and won this right for all of us.

Voting turns the tables on bad government and only through full voter participation can open, civil government be possible.  The only way to counter what is bad about elections is to vote.

Vote November 8.

The Star Ship Enterprise began its 5 year mission with everything an intergalactic traveler needed:  state of the art communication, advanced computer systems, fully equipped recreation facilities, cavernous conference centers, and a fully functioning hospital.  What the Enterprise lacked, and no one seemed to miss, was a library.

In Gene Roddenberry’s future, books have disappeared, replaced by something that looks very similar to an iPad.  Futurists, like Roddenberry, imagined and designed a world for his crew that was easy, uncluttered and rational.

The future we saw growing up in the 60s, whether in comic books, novels or on television, was a place where the pesky inconveniences of everyday life had been done away with.  For story-tellers, removing day to day impediments enabled the hero to save the universe without first having to learn an alien language; and in today’s world, we go about the heroic work of every day life free from having to grope for quarters for the pay phone or needing to rely on strangers for directions to I95.

Charles F. Kettering, who invented, among a host of other things, the first aerial bomb, boldly stated that “Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.” By “our imaginations”, Kettering didn’t mean my imagination or yours, he meant the imaginations of people Like Steve Jobs, Johannes Guttenberg and Henry Ford.  It was Ford who pointed out that, initially, people didn’t want cars, what people really wanted was “faster horses.”  Yet, by translating our desires—our desire for comfort and speed—into objects, inventors took us to the future we wanted but couldn’t imagine.

We move forward by pushing back against our shortcomings (memory and knowledge) and nature’s obstacles (gravity and time).  We desire a world that is easier; a world that responds in a nanosecond to our thoughts and impulses: Star Trek’s communications officer, Nyota Uhura’s 1960s version of Bluetooth may have been a story-teller’s quick fix to interstellar communication but it’s become something we’ve ‘made so’ because it makes our life more controllable and (theoretically) more actionable.

In our invented future there are no books—or at least books that are bound together by paper and glue.   The purveyors of books, like me, know the future because we’ve seen the past—we’ve seen record stores melt away taking all that vinyl with them.  And there is no one to blame for the fact that the future arrived, all sleek and shiny, just as predicted.

When Guttenberg’s printed Bible came off the press; not everyone was happy.  The Church feared—presciently it turned out—that people’s faith in the clergy would diminish once the Bible could be studied by anyone and, in fact, attendance fell off at religious services.  The 13^th Century’s version of the Luddites pounced on the mechanically printed book as an affront to the beauty of handmade, hand lettered books.  Victor Hugo, writing 400 years later blamed Guttenberg’s invention for destroying great architecture and inciting revolutions.  But, the printing press prevailed—bringing down the cost for books and making them easily available to almost everyone, including revolutionaries.

The printed book has had a long and, if you will, storied life; but while the fate of the physical book is finite, future possibilities remain, as ever, infinite.

A customer came to my store looking for a book by Gretchen Rubin called, The Happiness Project.  While we did not have the book, (we do now) the customer and I had a very enjoyable talk about Happiness and the possible reasons that so few of us apply the same rigor to being happy as we do to, say, exercising our bodies.  It intrigues me that while there are 100s of reasons to be happy most of us cling to 1 or 2 reasons to be un-happy.   For me, I have an inborn fear of contentment; a fear that I will lose proper motivation if I believe that lemons should always be turned into lemon-aid or that closed doors simply mean I should open more windows.

Yet, according to most books on the subject, including The Happiness Project, happiness is a choice; like choosing between having a hamburger with fries or without.  So why is it so hard to choose happiness?  One reason is that no one around us seems all that happy; in fact we are willingly and unwillingly confronted every day with anger and it is very easy to get caught up in someone else’s hissy-fit.  Newspapers and other media seem to love a good fight; so much so that the old journalism saw of “if it bleeds it leads”, has morphed into:  “if it yells, it sells”.

And, there is no end to yelling.  Every issue, no matter how small or how far removed from our own lives seems to invite rabid comment and personal vilification.  Political lawn signs can provoke as much vitriol as the jury’s verdict in the Casey Anthony case.  We attach monstrous rationales to people we don’t and cannot know, and are eager to engage in personal attacks that feed our own and others’ outrage.  We are also adept at moving blithely on to another, and another, and another ‘outrage’, while all the while being outraged at anyone who is not outraged.

A good part of being happy is about being fair and judicious.  Aristotle writes that no one can be “just and temperate – and therefore happy – merely by accident”. It takes effort and wisdom to be fair.  In the 5^th Century B.C., Socrates took time out from fighting in the Peloponnesian war to wonder about happiness: “Since all of us desire to be happy, and since we evidently become so on account of our use—that is our good use—of other things, and since knowledge is what provides this goodness of use and also good fortune, every man must, as seems plausible, prepare himself by every means for this: to be as wise as possible.”  (Plato, Crito).

One chooses to be fair and temperate just as one chooses to be extreme and outraged; as a practical matter, it is easier to find happiness knowing there are no demons out to get us than it is to do battle with all of the monsters we conjure.

Charles Schultz, the creator of Charlie Brown, defined happiness as a “warm puppy”.   Jerry Seinfeld evokes a box of kittens to rid his mind of unpleasant thoughts and my son intones “box of kittens, box of kittens” when he doesn’t want to discuss his grades.  Socrates, Aristotle, Charles Schultz, Jerry Seinfeld, and my son seem to know that no one will ever find happiness by imagining a box full of demons.