“To blow the dynamite
of a message
is the only way
to make the message dynamic.”
Peter Maurin in an Easy Essay

I have always been attracted to this quote from an “Essay Essay” of Peter Maurin. The problem today is how, in an age of media overkill, too much information, numbness of people who do not want to hear a message, how you blow the dynamite of a message. My experience is that the message is ignored and/or the messenger is marginalized. If the messengers persist they might get a courtesy response but if they keep on persisting that the message be responded to they, with the message will ignored. Seeing and hearing a message you do not want to hear has become an art form in USA.

Locally, I have been involved with messaged like “Marquette University Teaches Killing”, Taking down the rims at Doyne County Park is a form of racism and building a St. Vincent de Paul Thrift store in Greenfield for millions is wrong and immoral. These are messages people do not want to hear or enter into creative dialog so they are ignored. Friends have asked me to give up on these issues but how I cannot figure out to ignore my conscience.

If I could just blow the dynamite on these messages they would be dynamic. I have tried research about these messages but rational or historic augments are not in vogue. People just call facts “my opinion”. There is a very weak sense of right and wrong and of conscience. We are drowned in issues and causes on all sides and just pick and choose the ones we like to hear and shut out the rest. We are so desensitized that even pictures, like those of Palestinian children brutally killed in Gaza, if we are exposed to one, do not move us to cry out for the US and Israel to stop the killing.

If words and pictures do not work, how do we “blow the dynamite” of the message? A few take nonviolent actions, like entering a nuclear or drone base, but only few, those who agree, even notice the actions. Civil disobedience has been rendered weak in blowing the dynamite of a message.

If Jesus was alive today and was falsely accused and killed by the government for treason, as he was by the Roman Empire in Palestine, I do not think there will not be much of a notice. When walking the way of the Cross in Jerusalem we were just another group of pilgrims ignored by crowds around us just as Jesus was probably just another criminal killed by Romans in his day.

If all this sounds negative and depressing it can be. People with mental illnesses like my son or Robin Williams, the actor, just get so overcome from their depression that they have no way out except suicide. But persons like us ‘normal’ or ‘next to normal’ do not have that option. We can numb ourselves, be insensitive, ignore the message or face the messages of our times and open ourselves, like Jesus, to be outcast and rejects. Peter Maurin was an outcast from society and by accepting his condition and still speaking out he made a difference. Maybe just Rejects can blow the dynamite of a message.

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