Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words

In this pre-post covid world, I find myself thinking of Eliza Doolittle. If you remember her, you would know her from Shaw’s Pygmalion or from the musical version, “My Fair Lady”.  But unlike Eliza, who implores the listener, don’t talk about things, show me! I seem to be pondering the change of meaning of life. Not in its largest sense but in the verbal sense and seems to have moved from a noun to a verb. In the past something that we participated in, a verb, implied action. However,  today, life seems to have been transformed into a noun, while not a person or place but truly a thing that one can watch. We seem all to have become Chauncey Gardiner, or Chance the Gardner if you prefer, finding it easier to watch than participate. “How dreadful about that black man dying with a police mans knee on his neck. Have you seen it?” Why go protest in the streets, one could die without the benefit of having it filmed for Tic Tok or Instagram. What better way to be safe now- why risk physical or mental injury actually participating in life when one can simply observe it behind glass and mask? So perhaps to this we have come, our lives are no longer what we do but an accumulation of what we can watch others do. Hopefully, I am not alone in hoping that the day will come when life returns to being a verb and our epithet will not be “I like to watch”