Silence is Golden

A blessed silence falls upon the land. All is calm, all is quiet. Actual birdsong can be heard again, and the murmurings of our own thoughts. Twitter has silenced our Dear Leader. Now he is the Former Dear Leader, banished to St. Helena (oh I mean Mar-a-Largo). His tweets were mercifully swallowed by the great maw of the past and a healing silence reigns.

You could no more escape the Dear Leader’s tweets than the Chinese could escape the sayings of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. His tweets were everywhere. Newspapers, radio, television, internet, alerts on our phones. Swirling through the air like a force of nature. The all caps anger, the lies, the misogyny, the misspellings, the insults, the firings, the hate, and the stupidity. They bombarded us on a daily even hourly basis, the constant background noise of our lives. 

And it wasn’t just the tweets themselves. With malevolent energy they seeped into every last crevice of human discourse. I saw the best minds of my generation howl in protest when their editors assigned them to deconstruct the latest inanity. Dear Leader’s tweets had to be pondered and pontificated upon. Diced, sliced, and dissected. Analyzed with Talmudic discernment. While the internet trolls spewed accolades, amplification, or just plain gleeful gloating. It was all so frenetic and discombobulating.

Now the soothing hush. It’s boring, some say. Like addicts missing the rush. But listen, listen to the sound of silence. It’s golden.