Odd, how things work out...

As I was brushing my teeth last night in preparation for going to bed, I was struck with an incredible realization. My blog, as you can tell and I explained last night, is titled 45:1, for obvious reasons laid out in the text of my first post. However, as I sat on the edge of my bed thinking about what I had just realized, the similarities to what I had been struck with and what I intended of this blog were quite interesting.

It has been many, many years since I had read this book, but Fahrenheit 451 was what struck me last night.

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper auto-ignites. Allusions were made to this book by good ol' Michael Moore with his 'documentary' on 9/11, titled "9-11 the temperature at which freedom burns." Trust me, the original book was much better than any garbage peddled by Moore.

In the book, 'firemen' travel around on the governments dime and burn things. They are, in fact, quite opposite to the 'firemen' of today, who are charged with putting out fires. No, the 'firemen' of the future are in fact censor men, and they hunt for and burn anything that could lead to free thought and expressive creations.

Interestingly enough, according to my research, Bradbury intended the novel to be a jab at television. Check out this quote (taken from wikipedia, sorry)

“In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.”

Tell me, is this not a picture of what we see every day, all day? How many people do you see walking down the street, plugged into their devices, plugged into a whole new "reality" but in fact, absolutely oblivious to the world around them?

There is a problem with being so plugged in to a separate reality. I believe that it desensitizes you to your fellow human beings, and to REALITY as it truly is. I spent some time in Iraq. It was my first extended period outside of the United States. Sure, I had gone to Mexico once or twice, but both Kuwait and Iraq were completely different than anything else I had ever seen. I mean, besides the fact that it was a war zone.

When the invasion started we crossed the border, going "Heavy Kinetic" all the way to Baghdad as our beloved Colonel "Fightin' Joe" Dunford exhorted. Along the way, I had the opportunity to interact with occasional civilians, and see how they lived. The abject poverty that many of them lived in was a slap in the face to me and all my cultured notions of what "reality" was truly like.

Coupled with the fighting and the killing the "human element" was something that, when I returned to the United States, made me very angry. I remember standing in a Starbucks, thirsty for my first real cup of coffee in many months, and hearing a woman squeal about how her latte wasn't hot enough. It was all I could do not to explode on her. Fresh in my mind was the family that lived in the dump, or the other family that was gathering water from an irrigation canal that doubled as a sewer. Would they have cared how hot their latte was? Or would they have been thankful to be in a climate-controlled building drinking something that was in a clean cup, with pure water and not contaminated with disease? What is reality?

Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenhiet 451 was more prophetic than he may have realized. If, indeed, he wrote it to express his love of books, and of writing, and of free thought, and to decry the desensitization and brain-washing of the public from television and radio (and now, Internet), then if he is still alive today he must spend each day in a marveled daze at how we have turned out.

On an even grander scale is the fact that such a preferred isolationism, this sort of chosen hermitage among society, has also separated us from the One who, indeed, invented creativity and free-thought.

In our rush to buy the latest, the greatest, the most technological or the most convenient, we have (quietly, at first, and then with an outright middle-finger), shouldered out the King who is constantly calling for our attention. I remember, just a few weeks back, hiking in Bear Canyon, and marveling at the beauty of the place, and at the quiet and the solitude, and then glancing up at an on-coming hiker and seeing a dude who was plugged into his ipod and bobbing his head in time with the music, absolutely incognizant of the grandeur around him. Another time, my buddy Mike and I were hiking up near Bridal Wreath Falls, and encountered a gentleman who was having quite a heated conversation on his cellular phone, some six miles up and away into the wild. What is the purpose of these gadgets in such a place? Where one should be quiet, contemplative, instead they are filling those quiet moments with noise, clamor, with busy-ness and with action.

I believe that when people do this, they are doing it because they are afraid, afraid of hearing the quiet, gentle voice of the One who is constantly calling. Don't be mistaken: He may have created the Universe, He may be depicted as a Mighty Warrior (and we would be well off to remember that this isn't just a depiction), but He is also a gentleman, and He would never take by force that which He could receive through a gift. In scripture, it is said that He "Stands at the door and knocks..." He does not have a battering ram, He does not have an entry-model shotgun, ready to blast down the door to your heart, move in, and take over.

We can make the fatal mistake of drowning out the knocking of the King, by filling our lives with detritus and busy-work. I ask you, would it kill us to unplug? How hard would it be for any of us to remove our distractions, for even one hour a day. Do you jog in the mornings? Walk at night? Leave your mp3 player behind one day out of the week. Simply be silent. Enjoy creation. Listen for the King.

Getting back on track, all of the above is what ran through my head last night as I brushed my teeth. Psalm 45:1, what I am officially making my "life's verse," and what ended up being the title of my blog which, I hope, will end up being exhortations for us all to be free-thinkers, to delete censorship in our lives, to unplug from the television, the radio, mp3's, and the like, and to focus on the Creator, has a distinct correlation to Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451.

I don't believe in coincidences. Do you?