At the risk of sounding like a prude...

I am writing this blog piece knowing how it will come across. I am ashamed in advance for my apparent elitism, which I despise in others. But it's all true (from my perspective)  and has to be said. I just can't take it anymore!

What is it that has me all worked up? Everything, everywhere! I am bombarded with it. Maybe it's just the extreme heat or my own hormones (quite likely) or age itself. I may have crossed some invisible barrier in the maturity process that makes me cringe at the crude, the vulgar, the stupid, and the profane. 

I first noticed this phenomenon years ago while watching late night television, which is a bastion of the crude, the vulgar, the stupid, and the profane. (That might be where I overdosed on the stuff.) I cringe at Jay Leno's sex jokes and the stupidity of the people in his man-on-the-street interviews.  After watching David Letterman on various networks for the better part of two decades, I stopped watching his show cold turkey after witnessing him belittling a guest. Seriously -- cold turkey! Can no longer abide the man!

I have just returned from my local Walmart where I witnessed:

• a screaming child and his aloof mother (I know, I know - she may have had her reasons for ignoring the behavior, but the child needed some sort of comforting, or a nap, or something)
• an angry, mean father dominating his three small children while his pregnant wife looked on in silence
• magazine covers about bad boy Justin Bieber, bad girl Miley Cyrus, and new mom Kim Kardashian

But Walmart is not the place to go when you are looking for serenity and beauty -- it's the place to go for good deals. I usually have much better experiences shopping there at odd hours when fewer people are present. Again, the elitism -- I cringe at that, too.

Two consoling thoughts come to my mind...the first, a line from an unknown poem, "the world is too much with us," which (by Googling) I have discovered to have been written by William Wordsworth in 1806. Could he have experienced a similar phenomenon so long ago? Apparently so.

The other thought that comes to mind is from an LDS hymn of the same name: "Where Can I Turn for Peace?" by Emma Lou Thayne, a poet I have actually met. She was in her 80s and still as alert and active and delightful a person as I have ever met.

I will post both of these poems below, in case you need solace from the crude, the vulgar, the stupid and the profane as much as I do.

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND SOON

By William Wordsworth, 1806 

          THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
          Little we see in Nature that is ours;
          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
          The winds that will be howling at all hours,
          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
          It moves us not. ...

Where Can I Turn for Peace? 
By Emma Lou Thayne

1. Where can I turn for peace?
   Where is my solace
   When other sources cease to make me whole?
   When with a wounded heart, anger, or malice,
   I draw myself apart,
   Searching my soul?
2. Where, when my aching grows,
   Where, when I languish,
   Where, in my need to know, where can I run?
   Where is the quiet hand to calm my anguish?
   Who, who can understand?
   He, only One.
3. He answers privately,
   Reaches my reaching
   In my Gethsemane, Savior and Friend.
   Gentle the peace he finds for my beseeching.
   Constant he is and kind,
   Love without end.