Lifetime learning is important. Reading is important.
Okay, I am about to preach to the choir. I KNOW that the people who are likely to read
this blog post are readers, otherwise they wouldn’t be interested in anything I
have to say. But I am going to say this
anyway.
FIRST – Reading teaches empathy. It gives us practice
getting into someone else’s head and POV, making us think about things that we
might not have considered in our normal life, helping us view situations that
we would never have otherwise experienced.
I have never been a black man. But by reading mysteries with EZ Rawlins and
other characters, I’ve had the opportunity to be shown inside the thinking of a
black man and to experience the prejudice that was a part of his everyday
life. It gave me understanding that, I
hope, made me more considerate than I might otherwise have been.
That’s just one example.
SECOND – Reading teaches us things. Okay, that sounds stupid. But bear with me.
When my son was very little (and I mean VERY, since he
was reading before he ever got to kindergarten), we were talking in the car and
he said he wanted to know everything. So I told him. “READ.
If you learn to read, and read well, you can learn anything. Because everything we know is written down
somewhere. And even if it is written in
another language—someone’s written down how to learn that language. You want to know everything? The way to do it is to learn to read.” He hasn’t stopped since.
I believed it then. I believe it now.
THIRD – READING IS ENTERTAINMENT, cheap, accessible
entertainment that doesn’t even require electricity. People were reading LONG before we had
electric lights. And I sincerely hope
we’ll be reading far, far into the future when the light bulb is just a quaint
memory.
Can’t afford cable (or dish, or internet?). Find your way to the library. There, at your fingertips, is entertainment
on the grand scale, available FREE FOR THE ASKING.
But I worry.
Because reading is becoming tres unfashionable.
Seriously, people are given shit for reading. Even with the turn of the culture and the
rise of the geek, reading hasn’t “caught on.”
I was told by a woman at my job that she was “stunned” people would pay
me to write books because “she doesn’t have time to waste reading.”
Seriously? She has
time to shop and cruise the internet.
But reading, feeding the brain, is a waste
of time? WOW. Just WOW.
We are supposed to take in our information in bits and
bytes. We’re supposed to be VISUAL,
soaking in flickering images from a screen.
If we read, we’re to do it electronically.
There are studies that show how many people don’t crack a
single book after they graduate high school; or college; or whatever.
It makes me sad.
It also scares the crap out of me.
People need empathy. Look at any of the news feeds and you can see that. People also need to get their information from multiple sources. (Including, my friend, Wikipedia). They shouldn’t trust a single news source as
being unbiased. They should ask questions and keep
learning.
Because the world doesn’t stop moving forward. Things change daily. You need to keep up. And reading, whether on the page, or on a
flickering data screen, is the best and easiest way to do that.
People need to ask questions—not just be led blindly by
the most charismatic, handsome guy or gal on the screen.
Hitler was charismatic.
So was Stalin.
I may not love every bestseller that hits the top of the
list. But it brings me joy that they
do. Because it means that SOMEBODY is
reading. And when something like the
Harry Potter phenomenon hits, I crow with absolute delight. Because an entire generation of people
remembered that reading is also, at it’s core FUN, EXCITING, and ENJOYABLE.
End of sermon.
Stop reading this. Go, pick up a
book.
Cie
