Critics

Our society has created a generation of critics. I have noticed fewer and fewer of us actually create. We rehash and spin. Tonight I was watching a really great concert on PBS and realized that it had been a very long time since I had created anything new. I look back at this blog and there is nothing new, there is only commentary and tired questions. I look at other blogs and popular entertainment and most blogs and a lot of entertainment is simply critical of other things. We have more book critics than authors. We have more movie critics than directors. Etc.

I think it is great that we are more informed now than we ever have been before, but I think that our mistake is thinking our criticisms can take the place of our creativity. I think that we should get a greater sense of individual accomplishment based solely on our own work and not accomplishment based on the cutting down of the work of others. A friend told me a while ago that a popular personality was criticizing a scientific theory and when asked what her alternative was, she replied, "You don't have to open a restaurant to be a food critic." To continue using that analogy, I think that we are moving towards a society in which you dont even have to eat to be a food critic, and I think that is a mistake.