People packed the piazza for the village festa. Milling with the crowd I could see a little six-year-old child happily gathering mounds of confetti and tossing them up in the air over and over again. In his excitement he had drifted away from his parents and completely lost sight of them.
Realising he was lost in a crowd of strangers he broke down in panic. Meanwhile, from afar, his hidden but vigilant parents watched their little child panicking and took their time to rescue him. They wanted to teach him a lesson: you can only survive a crowd if you keep your loved and loving ones in sight.
That child’s plight is a paradigm of our so-called progressive society. When we lose sight of our loved ones – family, friends or community become just one anonymous crowd. We lose our identity, sense of belonging, and therefore the meaningfulness of our lives.
As a society we have become addicted to parties, receptions, feasts and all kinds of celebrations. Restaurants and eating places are mushrooming all over the place. Birthdays, weddings, graduations, baby showers, and late-night dancing are becoming almost boring, day-to-day non-events.
Any excuse is good enough to throw in a party – an opportunity to dress up, mill around with familiar or less familiar strangers, beam plastic smiles while cosying up to unknown strangers, and...
let the drink do the talking! These become crafty means to escape in deafening music that saves us the trouble of keeping up a simple, meaningful conv.