Editor's letter: Remember silence?

last updated 8 January 2015

Can you please just shut up? Stop running your big mouths. Quiet! No, not you. Them: The two guys over there, using their Outdoor Voices on my cramped commuter train as I try to write this. (Yes, some of us are working, you braying morons.) I don’t care about your irritating boss, or whether you think the Jets should sit Sanchez and play Tebow. Neither do all the other plainly exasperated people sitting around me, trying to read, work, or just enjoy a half hour of blessed silence. Remember silence? Probably not, for it is dead. As author Tim Kreider said in a splendid essay in The New York Times this week, you cannot find any measure of quietude in any public place anymore: Insipid music fills restaurants, stores, and stadiums; banks of TVs blare from the walls of bars; idiots blast their MP3 players so loud that their aural effluvia leaks from their earbuds, assaulting everyone within 20 feet like a bad odor. “The war is lost,” Kreider says. “And so the volume has incrementally risen, the imbecilic din encroaching on one place after another—mass transit, waiting rooms, theaters, museums, the library.”

Why am I so irritated by the imbeciles who make the din? No doubt my crankiness is another sign that I am growing old. But it’s not just that: When narcissists prattle loudly into their cellphones in a public place, or erupt into shrieking, wine-fueled laughter throughout your fine restaurant meal, they are sending a clear message: “We are sharing this space, but who cares if I’m bothering you? I matter, and you don’t.” Wrong, you jerks. Now, for the love of God, shut up. I am begging you.