The Directions We’ve Been Given Are Going To Get Us Lost
I’m not exactly keen on New Year’s Resolutions. If you’re a fan of Make It MAD on Facebook** then you know I successfully accomplished my list of 2010 New Year’s Resolutions, which, I will share with you now, was as follows:
1. Do not get eaten by a shark this year.
One could say I did not set the bar high, however, I say make resolutions you’re guaranteed to accomplish. I like feeling successful. I weighed the possibilities of running into a shark while walking down the street, and after careful calculations knew all I had to do was never set foot in the ocean during 2010 to guarantee success. As a result, I never had the chance to get ripped apart by a school of Great White Sharks or that sucker who swims around with a hammer on his head. Mind you, I did not make it a point to entirely avoid the ocean, but no one bought me a boat or some snorkeling gear, either. So everything worked itself out. I was ready to take on 2010.
Now we are out of the tens and into the teens. A new decade has begun, and even though I am not crazy about a list of resolutions, I can’t help but feel a fresh start and a new direction is associated with the beginning of a new year.
And I found myself discussing matters of this particular new year rather recently. Tonight, in fact, as I sat and chatted with the men of the apartment I am currently residing in, enjoying their company, contemplating the topic of this particular blog, one of our brilliant minds voiced concern (somewhat off topic) that we’ve lost our respect for people getting on and off elevators. This sounded like a gentlemanly quality, so he immediately had my attention. I urged him to continue. He graciously explained himself: I touched a boob last week and she had no reason to get offended.
Fair enough. How often have you crowded those ominous silver doors before they open like you are the only person on the planet that particular elevator was built to assist? And when those precious doors open, you’re momentarily pissed that twelve other people happen to be on board and you’re thinking, “How they hell did they find out about this invention? Don’t they know there is a perfectly good set of stairs around the corner?”
This, of course, got me thinking about the current state of our society.
Not only are we impatiently crowding elevators, but we now live in a world where Jennifer Lopez has permission to judge and define talent, and where there’s an entire week dedicated to sharks. A man on Twitter that simply refers to himself as @badbanana (who, if I may, is both brilliant and hilarious) is one of the most followed individuals on Planet Twitter. However, he’s no match for the fictitious dark wizard, @Lord_Voldemort7, over 500,000 people all appear to be following as well. Birds are dropping dead mid-flight, and Snookie from the Jersey Shore has written her first novel about a girl’s endless summer at, where else of course, the Jersey Shore. (I know it’s early, but I predict the Nobel Prize in literature might overlook this particular gem.)
We are headed in a certain direction in 2011, and I am beginning to wonder if it’s the right direction.
When the porn industry is a bigger business than professional football, basketball, and baseball combined, I’m relatively certain that if you took all the porn off the internet, there would be no more internet.
The film industry knows that we as consumers now consider comedy as blow jobs, hand jobs, fart jokes, and how many times the F word can be said in 120 minutes. This is a far cry from Ferris Bueller and Say Anything, some of the biggest comedies of their time. Have we lost our minds, or have our minds been taken captive?
How many of you saw Black Swan because it was a ballet movie, an Aronofsky flick, or because Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman have hot lesbian sex in the film?
We spend hours in front of the television watching reality stars name their body parts, housewives blowing copious amounts of money, and letting casual sex, sexual innuendo, brief nudity, and the joys of multiple partners with no ramifications whatsoever flood the minds and ears and eyes of not only adults, but our children, and it should be no surprise that 56,000 people are diagnosed as HIV positive every year in America.
Ad campaigns throw your sexy neighborhood vampires all over each other with the simple, subtle, and seductively destructive tagline: Do Bad Things. Looks like fun. Sign me up. Am I wrong to ask, “How is that helping our decision making skills?”
We were more concerned with the legalization of gay marriage in 2010 than we were with saving the lives of the broken, starving, and HIV-infected orphans and widows of third world countries. Millions of dollars is spent on the NOH8 campaign*, legalistic politics that will never save anyone, and all it takes is $16 a month through an organization such as Generosity Water to provide 1 new person every month clean drinking water for the rest of their lives. Don’t get me wrong, I want everyone to be happy and in love as much as you do, believe me, but sometimes our lives are just not as important as others.
And what ever happened to “Till Death Do Us Part”? Broken marriages continue to crumble at an alarmingly rapid rate. Getting divorced these days is as easy as breaking up with your high school sweetheart before going off to college. Why has it become so common and supported to get divorced rather than working through your problems?
Birds are dropping dead all over Arkansas, missiles are aimed every which way between North Korea, South Korea, China, and America, and we’re silently panicking over 2012, yet the Bible clearly states that the end of time cannot be predicted. Sure, there will be signs, but if you’re truly worrying about this, are you really living life right now or just killing time?
We claim we are all about love and peace and equality, yet we shun and disrespect the very man, Jesus himself, who encapsulated the very meaning of love, whose message down to its very core was love, love, love, RELENTLESS LOVE. Love of EVERYONE. Yet we are so quick to hate him.
And each other.
We have become tolerant of everyone and everything, sitting back, watching injustices of this world and shrugging shoulders as if to say, “Well, that’s just the way it is.”
But what if the way it is isn’t the way it’s supposed to be?
© Copyright 2011 Make It MAD
*Please know that I value, respect, and love your comments, and I understand that many of you may want to comment on this topic, the ideas and politics behind it, and voice why you may or may not believe in the cause. The above statement is not a dismissal or an attack on the NOH8 campaign. It’s simply only one example out of many as to where our attention and money has been focused. It’s a topic I would love to write about, but because it is not the focus of this blog, it’s a debate I ask you to take elsewhere until I do write more in depth about it.
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