By Martin H. Levinson

Internet Fasting Day

I know what you’re thinking: we’re all too hooked on the internet and social media to last 24 hours without them. The American people would never agree to stay off Google, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and email for an entire day. You’re right, of course, and there’s more to the tale. Studies done at MIT and Caltech have shown that steering clear of the internet and social media for as little as ten minutes can be enough to induce PTSD and panic attacks in many individuals.

Besides posttraumatic stress syndrome and severe anxiety, there would be other repercussions from leaving the virtual world for a day. Feeling bored and with nothing to do, people might binge eat, take drugs, or, God forbid, read a book. Not being on their electronic devices, and as a consequence seeing the faces of folks they live with who they hadn’t bother to look at in a very long time, some individuals might be overwhelmed by the experience of talking to human beings they no longer recognize.

The fact is, Americans don’t want to live in the real world. We’re all quite happy being alone together in a virtual one filled with Facebook friends, Instagram associates, and Twitter followers, a world we have all gotten used to where technology rules and people are plugins.

National Be Civil and Courteous to Others Day

This nation was built on people being able to speak their minds and shout down the other guy. That’s what happened when, in response to Patrick Henry telling the Virginia House of Burgesses, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” a heckler cried “Why just one option! How about give me death or a bad case of shingles or a week in the stockade or some other terrible punishment.” Americans like to tell it like it is, and it is whatever we say it is.

Abraham Lincoln tried to be civil to the South before the Civil War and where did that get him. Woodrow Wilson attempted to be nice to the Germans but that didn’t keep them from sinking American ships. Bill Clinton was affable to the Republicans and they responded by shutting down the government.

It’s in our nature as the offspring of revolutionaries to get in each other’s faces and hurl insults, invective, and innuendo at the individuals we are speaking with, particularly if they are members of a political party we don’t like. We love to air our grievances and knock the opinions of others and if they can’t take it so much the better. We’re not fans of listening politely and giving thought to what other people are saying. We think civility is for pussies, which is what we are not. We are Americans. We are pit bulls.

National Do One Thing Well at a Time Day

America is about multi-tasking. We’re a can-do nation that believes the more you can do at once the more you can accomplish. Right now I am at home where I am simultaneously using my left hand to type an email to my boss, using my right hand to text to a colleague, speaking on my cellphone to a friend, listening to a Beethoven piano concerto, doing chair exercises to strengthen my buns, and . . . meditating. Later, at lunch, I plan to simultaneously prepare and eat a meatball sandwich, do the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, learn French on my iPad, do chair exercises to strengthen my calves, practice singing exercises that my vocal coach gave me, and do some . . . meditating. I wish I could do more but there are only 48 hours in a day and you have to sleep for some of them.

If I paid attention to each thing I was doing I would barely accomplish anything. I barely do accomplish anything compared to my wife who can do sixteen things at the same time while making a broccoli and cheese omelet for breakfast, getting the kids off to school, returning calls from patients she sees in her medical practice, preparing notes for a poetry class she teaches on Zoom, power washing the outside of our house, and . . . meditating.

Paying attention to things ceased to exist when TV was invented and with all the electronic devices that people are on today, and with research showing that the average human attention span is less than that of a goldfish, I can’t imagine we will ever go back to concentrating on anything. And that’s a good thing because you only live once so if you have the technology and a little get-up-and-go why not pack a thousand lifetimes into the experience.