"Removal"

I have begun reading E.B. White's One Man's Meat. The first essay in the book is titled Removal, and was written in July of 1938.

I like the way he draws pictures in your mind with his words. There's a wonderful simplicity about his choices of words, yet a lot of power to the images they create.

There is a section in this essay where he is talking about TV and its impact....now remember, this was written in 1938!

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tiddings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

I got a letter from a lightning rod company this morning trying to put the fear of God in me, but with small success. Lightning seems to have lost its menance. Compared to what is going on on earth today, heaven's firebrands are penny fireworks with wet fuses.

And the world has only gotten more so in the years since he wrote that, we seem to have not learned anything from our experience, like morons unaware of the world's history we are stumbling blindly on toward repeating it again and again.....