The final Harry Potter movie just blew away all records for an opening week. And while the reviews were largely good, the headlines were largely about the $168 million bucks it brought in. There's a message here, fans.The very same message hidden in virtually every other headline this morning. If together we can find it, just maybe it will help give some meaning to the mess in which we always seem to find ourselves.
The mess...? This daily machine-gun-fire of bad, downright scary, news. The meaning....? Virtually every news headline has to do more with the issue of Quantity than Quality. Check it out: The national debt crisis, entitlement programs, teacher pensions, presidential campaign funds, television shows, book sales, the height of buildings, even the size of church memberships for God's sake -- each and every one understood mostly in terms of the numbers involved. The astonish number of dollars! receipts! bodies!
What's going on here?
I have a thought. Numbers -- statistics as they are now more properly known -- have sometimes taken on a life of their on in the minds of mankind. The bigger the numbers, well gosh, doesn't that mean the better the object? Well, not really folks, if you have the least little ability to remember when Quality usually reigned supreme in the lives of most folk.
The Quality of the way the dollars were being spent on the movie, on the teachers being pensioned, on the candidates being funded, on the television shows being produced; the quality of the book being promoted, of the skyscraper being constructed, and pf the faith not the figures of the Church membership.
Want a simpler, closer example? Can you remember how fussy dad was when he was polishing that old family car to a gleaming perfection rather than obsessing about how many fancy new cars were in the family's future? Can you remember how serious mom was when she was baking her pastries for the Sunday meal rather than fixating on all the new prepared pies now available in the supermarket? Can you remember how carefully the family used to read and re-read some of the classics it had proudly accumulated on its living room book shelf rather than racing to buy the latest best-selling tell-all-memoir? The numbers of things around the house just didn't seem all that important.
Can you remember any of that? Well, I can. And if you can't....maybe you're just not remembering hard enough.
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I'm going to try remembering harder next time
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