Of Coarse, Of Coarse

I just got back from an invigorating walk to the post office, in sunny but still chilly weather. All was well until I espied, right in my path, that most feared of all hazards -- the first leaf-blower of spring. And that reminded me of the fact that a few simple devices have inflicted immeasurable harm on the quality of life in this day and age. I refer, of course, to leaf blowers, cell phones, and those sound systems that turn entire cars into boom boxes, with bass speakers that could crumble the walls of Jericho. Of course, there are other culprits as well, like central air-conditioning units, garbage trucks, crappy "public address" systems in high school gyms and church basements, those stupid plastic trumpets they sell at baseball parks, and so on. But for chronic and infuriating coarsening of our auditory world, nothing quite comes up to the level of leaf blowers, cell phones, and "boom cars". And again, I say -- aside from the known hazards such as increased hearing loss among quite young people -- we have allowed technology to mask, and obliterate, the natural things of this world (in this case, natural sounds) with the unnatural and the over-amplified, to the point where this level of assault is taken for granted, and on those rare occasions when we find ourselves in a truly quiet place, we think something is wrong. The most amazing thing is that we put up with it with nary a whimper. Outrages on the environment that would have been an occasion for lynching only a few decades ago are now accepted with resignation. And the few small victories, e.g. the fact that those boom boxes that are balanced on the shoulder are extinct, come far short of making up for the exponentially-increasing intensity of the imposition on our neurological stability. As a measure of society's tolerance for tyranny, it is very worrisome when one considers what the future might hold.