White Noise

I am hard of hearing. I am sure there are interesting and important words being spoken nearby, but they are lost in the constant hiss of misfiring neurons in my aging ears. White noise is always there obliterating consonants, turning meaning into mumbles. In ordinary conversation I strain to hear and miss a lot. With the help of earphones, I can increase the volume to compensate while I watch the national news. 

If we can hear well, our difficulty is the opposite. We hear more than we can attend to, so we tune out. Between sensation and perception there is filtering that discards what is most likely irrelevant, the equivalent of noise though we do not strain to get the meaning until someone complains, "Listen. I'm talking to you," and we realize we have missed something important.

We have missed something important. That filter ignores anything not immediately threatening. While we concentrate on immediate concerns (the pandemic, the price of gasoline, housing shortages), remote and future possibilities are noise until they become close and present. I have had my earphones on. The national news is yelling, "Listen. I'm talking to you. The future has arrived and we are in danger here and now." Anyone who is interested in survival for themselves, their family, humanity, life on earth; that is, everyone, should be listening with attention and making plans to live our brief lives gently on this precious, fragile planet.

Here are some things I almost missed.

 99% of climate talk is white noise. (CBC Ideas podcast)

Nations United, Urgent Solutions for Urgent Times presented by Thandie Newton (Youtube)

Mia Mottley's address to COP26 (Youtube)

Just-have-a-think retrospective on COP26 (Youtube)

No doubt you have heard some things I missed. You could add them to the comments below.

Ontario ignoring public's rights to environmental consultation (Global News)

Canada's climate change efforts going from failure to failure (CBC News)

BC floods (CTV News)

Where do we go from COP26? David Suzuki Foundation

How imagining our own extinction may save us (CBC Ideas podcast)