In the past, I have argued that young people must be taken out of their illiterate limbos – neither oral nor literate are they – and brought back to orality to start all over – from the beginning. Now, I believe it’s important to pull young people out from their world of virtual movement and bring them back into that interior space, that meditative space, where motion and emotion begin their journey. In my country, youngsters gobble up Big Macs, Biggie Fries, and Super-Size Cokes. The amount they consume is staggering, not just in numbers, but in calories, as well. How can young people not grow fatter and fatter, ingesting huge amounts of calories with the impression, the illusion, that they have gone through great activity and movement just by watching it happen on the screen? While the movement may be virtual, the obesity is shockingly real. Is it possible that living in the virtual, electronic world of heavy-duty excitement creates the illusion that one needs more and more fuel?

Let us substitute one kind of orality – consumption – for another kind, one where youngsters practice their sense of timing, their sense of humor, where they can learn to love the power of a few words, or a quip, a couple of well-turned sentences, an image – where they come face to face with the thrill of language. All this oral activity in anticipation of, in preparation for reading and writing. It’s in that oral state that interior space gets nurtured, as a preparation for young people coming into a fuller and more mature state – in literacy.

This is dangerous stuff, this culture of excitement. It may have even eroded some important elements of adult life. For many people seem to have lost the ability to understand or comprehend anymore the most aggressive and all-consuming form of action and movement – war itself. It’s too remote, too highly technologized, and, for the most part, too clean. We know war best when something goes wrong, and then only for a flash. And only as an adjunct – something called collateral damage. But more than that, I suspect, no, I fear, the declaration of war may be just another one of those things, among scores of others, like wild movies, super-fast cars, high-octane fuel, that keeps the air crackling with excitement. Advertisers use the phrase “high-powered” to sell all manner of things – cars, coffee, alcohol, salsa, and rifles.

Books cannot compete with the box office or B-1 bombers. But taking our students, no matter their age, back to a state of orality, to the free and easy, sheer pleasurable dance of words – logopoeia, as Ezra Pound calls it – can launch a young person on one of the most exciting journeys he or she can ever undertake. For literacy always begins in orality, and orality begins in a kind of meditative stillness. In the past, when someone asked me what I thought my task was as a teacher, I said, “to keep students awake during the electronic revolution.” I wanted students who could speak truth to power. We are in a new world now. I now want young people who have the courage of the word, and the conviction of the heart, to speak up for peace.

What a strange state of affairs, that the perfect, fortified defense against outright attacks of exciting violence should find its match in the most basic, evanescent, precious, most invisible and at the same time most actual stuff–human breath.