© Seth Wenig / APSandy Johal uses a selfie stick to take a picture of herself in New York’s Times Square in January.
Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the country's largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee. A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers, pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower room. A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all middle-aged or older white men. They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the sport.
"Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would come," suggested one gray-haired man.
But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a dwindling and graying population. No one is coming through the door to take the place of the old members.
A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole of electronic hallucinations—with images often dominated by violence and pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, "atomized," sucked alone into systems of information and entertainment that cater to America's prurient fascination with the tawdry, the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.
Comment: Western culture in general, and Americans in particular, has been socially engineered to be self-centered, distracted, narcissistic and oblivious to the world and the people around them in any real meaningful way. It is not by accident, and, in many ways, it is all pervasive. Watch the film
Century of the Self to get some better idea of how this has happened.
Comment: Western culture in general, and Americans in particular, has been socially engineered to be self-centered, distracted, narcissistic and oblivious to the world and the people around them in any real meaningful way. It is not by accident, and, in many ways, it is all pervasive. Watch the film Century of the Self to get some better idea of how this has happened.