Shock Value

I wonder if I am finally aging into that place I once thought my grandmother was in, that place everyone swears he or she will not enter when they grow older, where the world starts to look cold and insane.

Rudeness and insensitivity masquerade as a need to be truthful. Television shows, whose genre I talked about in jest at twenty, are actual programs now. In the name of entertainment people are displaying what is supposed to be their real lives, lives built around the theme, anything goes to get what I want because I have lots of money and am willing to do anything to get your attention. Dark clowns who make me cringe. We have reinstated the Roman arena with our own low grade entertainment disguised as people ready to preserve the brutal maintenance of social order at any cost in exchange for the supposedly understandable prize, not of a better life, but of a bundle of money, as if they are the same thing. And it is all reinforced by the solidarity of those who either benefit from this, or who are so angry it is an outlet for their own frustrations, or who are so far from being able to survive with dignity and success in today's world that they need to believe this is the way it really is.

Brutal people, conniving people and corrupt people, as well as exhibitionists, have been around a very long time, but when their form of reality becomes the norm, we become one step closer to the Bacchanalian lifestyle that led to the decay of Rome. Part of civilization, is at the very least, an outward manifestation, that we care. When it is no longer necessary to even pretend to believe in decency and ethical behavior, the danger arises that they might be lost.

What used to be an attempt to draw attention to our most beautiful attributes is becoming a contest of shock value.

People seem to feel the need to divide into groups, each one turning up its nose at the others until it becomes a contest of the absurd. Racism and prejudice, no longer publicly acceptable, become a challenge to find ways around. We have trials like OJ Simpson's murder trial, cock fights, dog fights, strong man and woman fights in dark alleys where the powers that be can turn their heads. A strong man contender stabs his wife's tiny dog to death while she is fighting in Iraq and she returns to his arms. Children are molested and abused in the name of love. Torture in the name of justice and morality becomes more and more widely acceptable.

If this is civilization, I am so far from being part of it that I feel like a one eyed eagle with only one wing. I sit up here in my aerie, looking down on a world, I do not understand, chastising myself for my own intolerance. The part of me that wants to understand, battles with the part that says there is no understanding, it is simply hedonism gone wildly out of control.

It is the dark side battling with the light, the eternal battle that seems to define mankind, what separates us from the animals. Or so it seems to me.