“Why Reading Books Is So Important”

This was a scene from the movie “Detachment” and its exactly how I feel. In the movie a substitute teacher played by Adrien Brody is telling a classroom full of fourteen year olds why its so important to read books in the society we live in today. I have been saying the same thing for a long time. In this case I couldn’t have said it better. At this point I wish I said like this…I take great comfort in knowing that I’m not alone. Its so sad not to mention scary to watch what is happening to the young people of today with the continuous flow of mind altering commercials and cell phone addiction. I wish more parents understood or even cared what their kids are doing or maybe even knew what is going on in this country… 
    The scene opens in his classroom the day after a parent teachers meeting in which not one parent shows up for the meetings after school. Brody is writing two words on the blackboard…He says,”what does that mean”? A young girl from class answers, “to take something in” Brody replies, “right, to absorb”. Brody writes the next word on the board and asks the same question in which the the same girl answers, “every where all the time”….The two words are “Ubiquitous Simulation” Brody asks a young man what that means and he replies, “always absorbing everything everywhere all the time”. Brody responds, “How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you”, he asks the class? Then goes on to say. Who here has read the book 1984? A small group of people raise their hands. That is George Orwell’s book about the future. Simply put for the purpose of this summery. It means today we have two belief systems. “To deliberately believe in lies while knowing they are false. The examples of this in every day life….How I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable. Our young men today are being told that woman are whores, bitches and they are things to be screwed. Beaten, shit on and shamed. This is a marketing holocaust. Twenty-four hours a day for the rest of our lives the powers that be are hard a work dumbing us to death. So to defend ourselves and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes we must learn to read to stimulate our own imaginations to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief system's. We all need these skills to defend, to preserve our own minds”.