Pietry often fills void at base of modern life

Digital cameras, central air, satellite radio, “Beauty and the Geek,” heated car seats. TV… Digital cameras, central air, satellite radio, “Beauty and the Geek,” heated car seats. TV dinners, scanners, pet-grooming services, cell phones pre-loaded with AIM, mp3-playing sunglasses. Internet porn and Hungry Hungry Hippos – what a miraculous, modern world we live in.

Somehow it’s not enough for us Americans to distance ourselves from the reality the bulk of the planet’s population is born into. Spending a life playing “NBA 2K6” on Xbox 360, drinking Mountain Dew with vodka in it, smoking weed and leaving your room only to search for soup or sex – perfectly fulfilling as that may seem, there’s something hollow that still tugs at the unconscious.

That something that’s doing the tugging should be drowned out, kicked quiet, disguised or annihilated. That’s the job of the powers that be, but they have, of late, become pathologically casual in decorating the spiritual void that shapes American culture.

Lives spent dedicated to distraction can never be whole, but so long as most of the population is distracted most of the time, the abyss they’re dancing over remains mercifully distant. The problem is that the abyss is widening and deepening, and too many people are beginning to look down.

Before, when anyone tried to turn away from our carnival of a culture to build something majestic, kind or simply honest, he was forced to stare down at this chasm. He was forced to stare at several decades of deceit, self-loathing, fear, gluttony, exhaustion and spiritual emptiness – a poor foundation for anything but delusion.

Now, the carnival cannot hide the chasm. Now, people who would never choose to look for it see this deeper truth out of the corner of their eyes. It may be difficult to accept for those who seek a deeper meaning, but witnessing the barren landscape of our civilization’s essence is damaging to those who are unprepared.

Eventually an awareness of the distance between what we are and what we believe we are settles in. The proliferation of those things that have always led people to find the world empty and meaningless is combining with a culture that has incorporated decades of ingenious societal deconstruction. Now, we have a terrifying truth that strikes with equal ease from children’s cartoons and politicians’ wars.

Many of us react by stumbling into abject apathy. It’s an apathy we wed to laziness, one that sires us a life of uneasy repose spent recuperating and hiding lest that vision of America ever again appears unfiltered. Whatever we do with our lives, there’s an inescapable cynicism softly tainting it.

An increasing number of people have reacted to their glimpse of this manmade abyss in exactly the way people throughout history have reacted to all sorts of terrors. They’ve turned to religion.

While the motives for any one person’s journey of faith ought not be examined for purity, there is a danger in large numbers of people seeking God for the wrong reasons. They will find, at the very least, the comfort of others, and their frantic need for comfort will create all the certainty required to blind them to any other truth, belief or even opinion.

Every panicked flee to religion leaves the rest of us with one more zealot ready to exercise his Constitutional right to vote. It makes sense that people would want to live in a nation that keeps its citizens from asking questions that lead to troubling epiphanies.

A question-stifling theocracy might seem quite reassuring to some. In a world that is increasingly interdependent, where cultures are colliding more frequently and more substantially, few things could be more dangerous to everyone than a nuclear nation with a divine mandate.

If the citizens of impoverished nations with that unquestioning mindset can wound their neighbors and horrify the planet, what atrocities – well intended or otherwise – might the world’s most powerful nation commit to keep from seeing its own sins, its own failures, its own emptiness?

Email Zak Sharif at rzs8@pitt.edu.