The Sound of Silence

When Simon & Garfunkel produces the words "Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again", I take a pause in my glorious existence and reflect just a tiny little bit.

Silence is a projection of acceptance and/or disbelief depending on your culture and how you were raised. Silence is also either a handicap or a conscious protest. Spoken words without a meaning and written letters without a thought doesn't necessarily signify silence in their physicality. Still, empty words are as good as synonyms with silence. Then these written letters might as well be silence. But are they? I think not.

The song; The Sound of Silence has undoubtedly a deeper socio-critic message in it, than the result of my reflection, which is as follows: A time-out has to go. I got bored.

Finland witnessed a dramatic election yesterday. Almost 30% of the Finnish population chose to represent themselves, meaning being silent and not voting. All of a sudden we have a nationalist party; the True Finns (PerusSuomalaiset, PS) as one of the three big players going from 5 seats to 39 in our 200 seat parliament. After getting almost a fifth of all the votes PS started their partying and my Facebook feed started to fill up with devastation and plans of emigration. Why? Because PS vows for the following points (among other things):

• No to EU (No to Euro).
• No to immigrants.
• No to aborts (a personal note from the leader Timo Soini).
• No to "mandatory Swedish" in schools.

We'll have to wait and see what the following 4 years brings us. Hopefully nothing extreme. Unless we're all silent and let us, without resistence to fall back to being an introvert country the rest of the world knows us as.

Nonetheless, unless it's unintentional, being a handicap, silence is a sign of growing stupidity and negligence. Therefore I won't be silent anymore. I did vote, I will talk, I will write and I won't call useless time-outs anymore.