My grandfather, of blessed memory, would constantly urge me to take advantage of my time, not to waste it. “The time goes,” he said, “and it never comes back.” In all fairness, this is what I remember him saying. I can’t recall when he started saying it, and I don’t remember all the things he said; but this stuck with me. And it was very meaningful coming from him. His was an image of someone involved in one thing or another; reciting his Tehillim, typing on his typewriter, changing light bulbs, bookkeeping, etc. It was noteworthy even to observe the way he would ‘watch’ television. If there was a football game on- inexplicably, my grandfather was something of a Michigan Wolverines fan- he would pause when passing the screen, but he would never sit down.
Despite the abundant evidence in his personal example, I always found it convenient to interpret his advice in the most general way. A teenager and young adult can appreciate only so much of what his aging grandfather means. As much as I admired, revered, and appreciated him- I heard his words with the prejudice that he was speaking as a retiree and with an urgency that simply didn’t apply to me. Don’t waste years, he was saying. Of course, in retrospect, I presume he meant more.
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The powerful and sobering thought struck me as I was engrossed in wasting time and feeling quite guilty about doing so. What if Gd were to tell me that He will shorten my life so long as I continue to dawdle? If He would take an hour, half an hour, five minutes or less for every hour, etc., that I spent aimlessly surfing the Internet or doing any of a number of other meaningless, useless, or even destructive tasks, would I continue?
I must have considered it quite a forceful notion, because I stopped straightaway. I don’t have any good reason to presume that Gd governs His world in such a manner, and, presumably, divine justice is much more complicated than that. But the mere possibility was compelling enough. Surely extra moments of my life were far more valuable than, well, the pursuit of nothing.
What was so terrible in the concern that I could lose five minutes? If my best hope for five minutes of my own time was that they would be wasted, that they could not be profoundly meaningful in the best of circumstances, then losing five minutes would not be a big deal. I never like to have anything taken away from me, even more so when it comes to moments of my life. I would like to think- I have to think- that those five minutes are invaluable.
There’s a postscript to my little epiphany story. Before I could get up, it really hit me. What if Gd wouldn’t take away portions of my life, because he didn’t need to? In a very real sense, I was already taking the time off my life all by myself. By investing my time in emptiness, I was already actively engaged in shortening my life.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Friday, September 4, 2009
An Apology to Ms. Spears
Dear Ms. Spears,
You don’t know me and have never heard of me. I am as certain as I can be that we will never meet. And, to be honest, I don’t even know your music.
All that said, you might wonder why I am writing you a letter. The shameful truth is, I owe you an apology. You would never know it, but I have played my own small part in wronging you and doing you everlasting damage.
Before you get the wrong idea, I guess I should explain myself. I think I am older than you are. When I first heard of you, I believe you were 15 or so, and I was already out of high school. Some people I knew owned your music. I knew that your songs were being played all over the radio, although I wasn’t listening to those stations. And though I wasn’t a concert go-er or an MTV watcher, I learned by osmosis that you were causing a great stir with your dancing and parading on video and on stage. While it was of no particular interest to me personally, the public eye celebrated you as something of a mini-goddess. They adored you and doted on you, followed you around and made you into a star.
But it wasn’t out of respect or true admiration that the world took notice. Unfortunately, it was out of exploitation. You were not noticed; you were ogled. The media objectified you and took advantage of you, all the while pretending you were older, more mature, and in control.
In time, the fascination petered out, leaving you out in the cold. The adulation to which you had grown so accustomed no longer came naturally, and you had nothing to show for it. At some point, I became conscious of headlines in mainstream media outlets, outlining a wide variety of your personal and legal troubles. I distinctly remembered that you had been blond, and then all of sudden you were a brunette. It’s very nice to be a brunette, of course; but you didn’t seem a very happy one.
I must not and cannot judge you; I can’t presume to understand the whole picture. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that you underwent a crisis. Here was the adoring world, following you with great interest, and then it was gone. And the only tool you had at your disposal to reclaim that attention was your physicality, your body. You learned that your mind was not valued and that your personality was not interesting; in short, you learned that the media thought that you were worthless.
And nobody came to help you.
Why am I apologizing for all this? I don’t run any media outlets, I never did an internet search for you or your name, and I can’t recall ever even clicking on a headline about you. But I cannot and will not deny that I too have played my own small role in the media’s mechanism for destroying women and destroying you. I held a hotmail email account, when they were running distasteful and empty banner ads aside my email. I read news and sports websites that regularly ran offensive articles and ads. And these images and ideas caught my attention. Wittingly or unwittingly, I learned your name and those of many other women like you, who are championed and supposedly exalted for all the wrong reasons. In these ways, I fed into a system which programmatically, if subtly, sends the message that a woman’s worth lies primarily in her sexuality. Clearly then, I helped to steal your youth and irreparably damage your life.
Obviously, these lifestyle choices have hurt countless others as well. Some have doubtlessly idolized you and wanted to follow in your footsteps, with idyllic notions of grandeur and without awareness of the consequences. As an aside, I think we could safely assume that the very same values influenced your own initial decision to plunge into this media world in the first place. And sometimes, we fail to acknowledge the toll that this objectification takes on men as well. The subjects of all this desire, men marginalize their own sensibilities and values in the most dehumanizing and depraved way. Men make themselves into animals.
But I have come to apologize to you. Your life should be more meaningful, is far more meaningful, than the world has publicly conceded. And I contributed to the distorted view that reduced you to a two-dimensional image. For this, I am truly remorseful, and I beg your forgiveness.
Wishing you better,
Yonatan Kohn
You don’t know me and have never heard of me. I am as certain as I can be that we will never meet. And, to be honest, I don’t even know your music.
All that said, you might wonder why I am writing you a letter. The shameful truth is, I owe you an apology. You would never know it, but I have played my own small part in wronging you and doing you everlasting damage.
Before you get the wrong idea, I guess I should explain myself. I think I am older than you are. When I first heard of you, I believe you were 15 or so, and I was already out of high school. Some people I knew owned your music. I knew that your songs were being played all over the radio, although I wasn’t listening to those stations. And though I wasn’t a concert go-er or an MTV watcher, I learned by osmosis that you were causing a great stir with your dancing and parading on video and on stage. While it was of no particular interest to me personally, the public eye celebrated you as something of a mini-goddess. They adored you and doted on you, followed you around and made you into a star.
But it wasn’t out of respect or true admiration that the world took notice. Unfortunately, it was out of exploitation. You were not noticed; you were ogled. The media objectified you and took advantage of you, all the while pretending you were older, more mature, and in control.
In time, the fascination petered out, leaving you out in the cold. The adulation to which you had grown so accustomed no longer came naturally, and you had nothing to show for it. At some point, I became conscious of headlines in mainstream media outlets, outlining a wide variety of your personal and legal troubles. I distinctly remembered that you had been blond, and then all of sudden you were a brunette. It’s very nice to be a brunette, of course; but you didn’t seem a very happy one.
I must not and cannot judge you; I can’t presume to understand the whole picture. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that you underwent a crisis. Here was the adoring world, following you with great interest, and then it was gone. And the only tool you had at your disposal to reclaim that attention was your physicality, your body. You learned that your mind was not valued and that your personality was not interesting; in short, you learned that the media thought that you were worthless.
And nobody came to help you.
Why am I apologizing for all this? I don’t run any media outlets, I never did an internet search for you or your name, and I can’t recall ever even clicking on a headline about you. But I cannot and will not deny that I too have played my own small role in the media’s mechanism for destroying women and destroying you. I held a hotmail email account, when they were running distasteful and empty banner ads aside my email. I read news and sports websites that regularly ran offensive articles and ads. And these images and ideas caught my attention. Wittingly or unwittingly, I learned your name and those of many other women like you, who are championed and supposedly exalted for all the wrong reasons. In these ways, I fed into a system which programmatically, if subtly, sends the message that a woman’s worth lies primarily in her sexuality. Clearly then, I helped to steal your youth and irreparably damage your life.
Obviously, these lifestyle choices have hurt countless others as well. Some have doubtlessly idolized you and wanted to follow in your footsteps, with idyllic notions of grandeur and without awareness of the consequences. As an aside, I think we could safely assume that the very same values influenced your own initial decision to plunge into this media world in the first place. And sometimes, we fail to acknowledge the toll that this objectification takes on men as well. The subjects of all this desire, men marginalize their own sensibilities and values in the most dehumanizing and depraved way. Men make themselves into animals.
But I have come to apologize to you. Your life should be more meaningful, is far more meaningful, than the world has publicly conceded. And I contributed to the distorted view that reduced you to a two-dimensional image. For this, I am truly remorseful, and I beg your forgiveness.
Wishing you better,
Yonatan Kohn
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