"If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater, suggest that he wear a tail." - Fran Lebowitz

Walmart has announced free shipping on orders of any amount. Doesn’t seem like such a big deal, really. They got it here all the way from China, so getting it to your door is small potatoes.

Kanye West is the latest reminder that talent (or, perhaps in this case, nothing more than celebrity status) is no indicator of either intelligence or maturity. One downside of the increase in media coverage that comes with cable TV and the internet is the hyping of what would otherwise be two-bit players. The media needs a steady source of personalities to feed our junk food appetite for gossip. Hence, Cheetos like Kanye.

I know it's not P.C. but I don't care. It's hilarious.
Cash 4 Cats

You’ve probably heard that cigarette packs will soon include some pretty graphic images of the damages smoking does to the body. I couldn’t help but think about abortion as I saw those news reports. Would the abortion rate drop if images of aborted babies were shown to those mothers considering an abortion. I am NOT advocating that. (Doing so at least raises questions about the dignity of a human life.) It just seemed like an obvious parallel.

Gravitas - seriousness, weightiness, deep significance.

Where does it come from, this sense of gravitas, this understanding that some things in life are serious and significant?
Sometimes we wrap events carrying gravitas in pomp and ceremony. We fill the environment with cues to tell us, “this is important.” The courtroom, an inauguration, a wedding...and back in the day, a church.

Now churches and what goes on within them are designed to minimize any sense of gravitas, which looks too much like snobbery or elitism, and too cold to the contemporary mind. We are a culture of increasing informality, where the suit is passe and the necktie is not far behind. “Good morning” has been replaced by “Hey” and wait staff starts off the evening by giving us their first name.

Youth are especially slow to grasp the gravitas of anything. A Junior High boy thinks the funniest thing in the world is a three-second fart, so we shouldn’t be surprised when the hush of a cathedral escapes his sensibilities. Old age is the opposite. They fart and don’t even notice it but move with slow respect in a cemetery.

One of the responsibilities of the old(er) is to teach the young(er) a sense of gravitas for those things in life that truly carry weight and significance. That can be hard to do because we don’t want to seem, well, old. But there is a time to laugh and a time to be quiet, a time to joke and a time to consider words carefully, a time to be casual and a time to be solemn. Some things and some events carry a gravitas, an importance that should give us pause.

Youth and contemporary culture both work against a sense of gravitas. Time helps with the former but will probably exacerbate the latter.