What to do?

He would have been a great talking head for television's talk show. He had a very logical mind. He had a very lively wit. He had an amazing way of expressing paradoxes. G.K. Chesterton did not have television so he had to use newspapers, but he used them well. His collected works amount to more than forty volumes. Most of his editorials were done for The Illustrated London News. He wrote in the early 1900's and wrote throughout World War I. His essays during the first World War focused primarily on reminding the English people that they were fighting an evil country which had invaded a small country. It was a long war. He felt that the citizens needed to be constantly reminded that Prussia had started this and needed to be defeated.


But recently a paragraph from the essay of June 19, 1920 has been stuck in my mind. He is responding to the new criticism of the new entertainment industry, the movies. He was hearing that the Cinema was bad for people because it showed them how to be crooks, or it inspired them to commit murder. the movies were too bloody, or there was too much love and romance, or they frightened people. We know the same arguments about video games. We have had the same argument about every new form of entertainment that has come out. Chesterton accepted none of those criticisms.


But what he did find disappointing was something nobody ever mentions. "Nobody mentions it , because everybody is helping to do the same thing in ways that are far worse. It is the indictment against the whole of our modern mechanical and urban civilization, and it is simply this --- that people cannot enjoy themselves. That is they cannot amuse themselves, and therefore they must be amused." Certainly that has only increased. The electronic devises we have to entertain ourselves have only gotten more abundant.


Hospitals have to have a television in every room. We have to have music in elevators, we have to have a radio or television on all the time. Cell phones, laptops, and all kinds of new gadgets and devices. All because we do not like to be alone. Chesterton says, "We do not enjoy ourselves,... We have to have something that does not come from ourselves."

Has to make you wonder what it is about ourselves that we cannot stand? Why is an hour with nothing to do the hardest hour in the world? Why do we spend so much time playing games on the computer? Are we really so empty inside ourselves that we cannot endure looking at our own lives? There is nothing wrong with all of our games, gadgets, entertainment programs, except they allow us never to have to look at our own lives and see if we need to confess, improve, change or rejoice. As long as we are filling up our time with activities outside of ourselves, we will never discover that many of our problems are our own fault. And that is a problem.