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Lack of context creates serious misunderstanding

Last week I heard my teenage son suddenly saying to a friend, “I hope you die soon!” Alarmed, I immediately went to see what was going on, thinking that perhaps there was a problem between the two young men.

I soon found out my fears were unfounded. My son and his friend were playing a videogame where they needed to take turns. Frustrated because his friend was winning and kept accumulating “lives,” my son expressed his frustration with a choice of words than in other context would have been totally unacceptable, and rightly so.

I strongly suggested my son to be more careful about his choice of words, at home, at school, and at any other place, because not everybody understands the context of an expression and because such de-contextualization could lead to either long explanations or serious problems.

I read some time ago the story, probably false, about a father who took his little son to a mall, perhaps to buy something. To keep his son active, the father challenged the boy to “race” him from one store to the next one. And the father always “won.”

Finally, frustrated because he lost again, the little boy began to cry and scream, saying, “Dad, please, don’t beat me anymore, please don’t beat me. You are making me cry a lot.”

According to the story, after the little boy said that, several by-standers, not knowing the context of the words, called security guards because they thought the father was abusing his son. It seems the father had to provide a long explanation for the whole incident.

If we de-contextualize a text, we will re-contextualize it in our own framework of reference and understanding, probably distorting the original text and perceiving it from a negative point of view.

Because of the lack of context, I thought my son was saying something inappropriate, when he was just expressing his desire to have his turn at the videogame. And because of the de-contextualization, a father was thought to abuse his son, when in fact they were just playing mini-races.

But beyond these trivial examples, the de-contextualization grows to historical dimensions, both to the past and to the future, when both unavoidable dimensions of our existence are severed and manipulated to the point of disappearing; distorting for that reason everything we see and try to understand.

If we don’t know where we were and where we are going to, who cares where we are now?

Lacking context and therefore meaning is something at the core of our post-modern times, a historical era with an clear understanding of what we are not and still unable to understand what we would like to be. For that reason, the dark cloud of desperation and meaninglessness is always menacingly floating about our heads.

Perhaps it is time to develop a historical consciousness, fully extended both to the past and to the future, to replace our current system of preprogrammed obsolescence, obsession with the present, and lack of trans-generational mentors.

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