Bored Dumb

It's Lent and I've given up alchohol (again). It is viciously icy here day after day, and Judith has just fallen on the lovely, coated shore (as pictured) for the fourth time this winter.

No wonder I am getting cranked up to be in "Post Valentine's Day, February Rant Mode," and being told by friends they are "bored"--a word used all too frequently in my neck of the winter woods--is just the thing to set me off. I've never liked the word, and ban its use with my students.

"Tired of the world" and "not interested" are the most common meanings of "bored"; but there are also those associated with the drilling aspect of the verb, such as "to make one's way steadily, especially against resistence." This I find of much greater interest. But verbs are active, and being an actor is never how one finds oneself "bored." Being bored is to have something done to you when you are NOT acting.

As a culture, we Americans, very much like unevolved adolescents (see The Gale Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence, which cites "boredom" as a condition most frequently affecting this group--and a condition closely related to depression), have a problem with boredom.

The primary cause of boredom in any situation is a lack of attention. And that's exactly what we are taught by the media and our public schools and our families to do: to not pay attention. Rather than being taught that everything is of interest--say, if not the plot of a movie or book, then the language or the cinematography; if not the moral quandary then the characters themselves, etc.--we're taught to either "like" or "not like" things. And if we decide we don't like something--say, a political candidate or issue--we lose interest. We shut down. We close ourselves off--in fact, we defend ourselves-- from the myriad of interesting details: like these stones, their colors and shapes caught just beneath the thin, translucent surface of winter.

We've become a culture of defense, and nothing illustrates this more readily or tragically than how often so many are bored dumb.