A few days ago I was driving down a three lane interstate when traffic slowed to a stop. A three-car crash further up the road had turned this normally bustling by-way into a parking lot, and I was in the heart of it. I wasn't in any sort of rush, so I turned up the radio and tried to let myself melt into the music and my thoughts. However, this state of mild obliviousness came to a screeching halt before it could even begin. As I was trying to find a suitable station, my impressively short attention span took control when it saw what can only be described as a flurry of bumper stickers on the car in front of me.
It was ridiculous. The amount ideas presented in this 6x2 frame was astounding and practically laid an assault on my thoughts. I was confronted by things as ancient as failed candidates from the 2000 election cycle and as varied as abortion, gun laws, "witty" jokes, and other things that I honestly can't even remember. Amidst all of the ideas presented I never had time to chew on one for more than a fraction of a second before being hit with another quip, thought, or platitude. Subsequently, all of those potentially great ideas were lost.
This is a car we have all seen, and it is also a car that leaves us with more questions than answers. Honestly, where did they get all of those stickers and who even is Bill Bradley? How does that person make time to save the whales when the closest ocean is 500 miles away? The back of this car offers nothing to us but a patchwork of thoughts. The back of this car causes our minds to wander, and we never get to develop some type of internal truth from the bag of ideas it presents to us.
This car is a result of what the modern world has done to us and is a reflection of the way we receive information. If you turn on ESPN or your preferred news station, then you will likely be met with the smiling faces of anchors relaying information; you will also notice a rolling bar along the bottom of your screen displaying nuggets of information. With the interference of those nuggets we are rarely able to truly ingest what the anchor is saying, and those nuggets are never expounded to provide us with more than factoids to tell our friends about what's going on in the world. Even Twitter has Moments now, allowing us to flit from thought to thought so effortlessly that it seems almost natural.
But it's not natural. We are wonderfully made to ponder and form our own internal monologues about great ideas, but we can't do this with a constant stream of nonsensical input. That car loaded down with ideas serves only to overwhelm our minds. Instead, having just two or three bumper stickers, maybe even four if you're feeling frisky, can more effectively implant whatever point you're trying to get across because you aren't bombarding people with ideas.
Plus, it just looks better.
