"Get on the Bus" was an overlooked Spike Lee movie from 1996 that followed a group of men headed to the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. The flick had a lot of messages, both serious and light, but the heart of the movie was the dialogue that traveling on the bus elicited among the men on board.
I was reminded of the movie recently as I joined a group of citizens for a daylong coach bus trip to our state's capital. The excursion was jointly sponsored by state Sen. Antoine Thompson and state Rep. Francine Del Monte. The idea was to give community-involved Niagara Falls citizens an opportunity to voice their concerns directly to lawmakers and department heads. While the trip was a mixed bag on that front, the bus trip itself was a home run.
I sat with former Falls councilwoman Candra Thomason on both the trip up and back. I'd met her on a few occasions before and appeared on her television show a handful of times, but we didn't have much more than a passing acquaintance. That can no longer be said, as after nearly 11 hours of uninterrupted conversation, Candra and I are true blue friends. If you can talk with someone for that long and not run out of things to say, you're friends for life -- period and end of story.
After we'd gotten back and I'd had time to digest the events of the whirlwind day, I began to realize that the bus ride was symbolic for all of what ails us as a community and a nation. Being on a bus and crossing the great, vast state of New York offers a rare gift -- time. Our society is so hell-bent on doing things quickly these days. We text, hands-free talk and multi-task as if our hair is on fire and we're trying to put it out with Red Bull.
What seems to have been lost is our ability to relax. We can't slow down anymore. To take our time doing almost anything has become downright un-American.
Think about it -- we actually have created two pastimes known as speed dating and speed chess. In speed dating, people sit at a table with a timer and get five minutes with each prospective love match. Questions are fired at a hair-trigger pace: What do you like best in a date? Where do you see yourself in five years? Anything in your medical history I should be concerned about? What's your favorite food? Who is your favorite Beatle?
Then the buzzer rings and it's on to contestant No. 2. Does it get you any closer to a potential love connection? Probably not, but at least you don't have to get stuck actually having a whole lunch with some loser, right?
Speed chess may be an even worse concoction. Chess, by definition, is a deliberate game designed to fully tax the human brain's ability to project multiple scenarios with outcomes that have various degrees of success for the player. The Grand Masters of the game think many moves ahead.
Once chess great Garry Kasparov was asked how far ahead he "thought" a game.
"Normally, I would calculate three to five moves," he said. "You don't need more, but I can go much deeper if it is required. For example, in a position involving forced moves, it's possible to look ahead as many as 12 or 14 moves."
Yet in speed chess the object is not to think ahead, or at all for that matter. Players are supposed to react on instinct by playing the move that first pops into their head. What if Picasso had painted using that method? What if Beethoven had constructed his symphonies in speed mode?
Just for fun I'm going to write the next line of this column using the speed method. There will be no thought as to what I'm saying; it will be all instinct, baby.
Rtedfrtyuiloippppnahlllpyqwertyytrewqtheatitonatuponacchht.
OK, I think we can put that concept to rest for the newspaper column-writing business. My spell checker actually looked at that sentence and asked me to step away from the bottle.
Other forms of media have problems with the speed game as well. Have you watched CNN or MSNBC lately? They have more scrolls than a room full of Torahs. Have you ever found yourself reading the scrolls while tuning out the person talking on screen? It happens to me all the time. It can't be their intention to divert your attention away from their programming, can it?
All I know is that I'm no multi-tasker. I'm lucky if I can concentrate well enough to do one thing at a time correctly. For instance, when backing the car out of the driveway I have to turn down the radio. If the stereo is blasting, I can only go one direction and that is forward. Once I tried to back up while Dave Matthew's "Crash into Me" was playing and I nearly took out the left side of my garage. I wasn't sure if it was ironic or near-tragic, but it was very nearly catastrophic to my wallet.
What's with the texting fascination with our youth, anyway? Am I the only one who thinks that texting is regressive technology? I mean, phones were already capable of calling someone and allowing you to talk freely and without character limitation. Instead, kids today are content to work their thumbs like third-world laborers just to send bastardized messages like, RU OK? (Are you OK?), BFN (Bye for now), or my favorite, CUWTA (catch up with the acronyms).
Seriously, kids, actually putting your buddy into speed dial and talking to him is so much easier than sending 500 text messages over an evening. Considering that generation's passion for rudimentary technology, I'm surprised Sony or Zenith hasn't tried selling them on the merits of black-and-white televisions.
Even Hollywood has been hit hard by the speed bug. Long gone are the days of the great train murder mystery pictures. It's hard to roll out the many plot points favored by a writer like Agatha Christie when the setting is a high-speed turbo jet that doesn't even serve peanuts to the passengers anymore. And how many times will a writer have to put characters in a cell phone dead zone because a convenient 911 call would bring the plot to a screeching halt?
What the bus trip to Albany made clear is that we're in a rush to disconnect ourselves from one another. At the state capital building we met in lucky room 711. There was a phone on the wall with an unmanageable tangle of wires leading from it to the phone jack. I asked Candra to take a picture of it because I thought it was symbolic of the financial mess Albany finds itself in.
In retrospect, I think it better symbolizes what has happened to us and to our ability to slow down long enough to properly hear each other out. Salvation has a name, brothers and sisters, and that name is:
"Greyhound."
Get on the bus.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 16, 2010 |