Is there anyone out there who can help start a campaign of awareness to notify the billionaires who are now planning drone delivery of our packages within 30 minutes of an on-line order that the noise pollution they will inflict might be the absolute end of our very thin sanity? As I watched this story on NBC Nightly News tonight I don’t know when I have ever had such a sinking feeling. Within the next few years they hope to work out this delivery system. The horrible little devices make huge noise and will be filling the air in our neighborhoods so that people won’t have to wait a single extra minute to have their shopping urges satisfied. As those entrepreneurs being interviewed discussed the kinks they are working out it was all about air traffic and making sure no one gets hit on the head when the drones come to our porches, not a word about the fact that any quiet left in our home life might be forever eradicated. I felt so helpless. How can we make our protests heard? Literally, I’m not kidding, for the first time I truly understood the monks who burned their own bodies in protest.

Who ARE we now? What have we become that we can’t wait more than a few minutes to have our consumerist needs met? Use the drones to deliver medicine urgently needed, or to bring food to the starving – but please, NOT to drop off our latest Amazon acquisition. This is what they are preparing to do as I write this.

But I don’t want to go on about the ravages of consumerism. I want to talk about the deep need in the human soul for silence, a sacred value that is not being protected. How can we pay attention to what really matters, to that which speaks to us from the innermost sanctums of our lives and beings when our senses are bombarded with these chaotic, manufactured noises? People who meditate are searching for that inner tonic that silence provides, but silence is also an attitude that we gather and move out into the commerce of life. There is a reservoir of silence that when we tap into it we will find answers to life’s real questions and the satisfaction of our truest needs, as well as healing, refreshment and recovery from damage created by an over-busy existence. If we lose this value we may just be doomed I feel.

Noise pollution is as serious a pollution as any other. It threatens our spiritual, psychological, emotional and physical health. How can we ask those who are making these plans to care about the rights of those who will be profoundly affected by this assault on our quiet? I do not know how to make myself heard by those who are creating these changes. Do you? 

Interesting how defending our silence may mean we cannot be silent. About this.