Anxiety and/or Fear 7/14/09
What is the true nature of the human
condition and what does it mean for the world? I've been trying to
work out what's been on my mind for the last couple of months, and
nothing has really hit home until I saw a "make money now"
character give his little spiel to the elementary kids. This prompted
me to think about trust and how I barely trust anything while so many
are willing to trust almost anything. Spokesmen like that exist
because of pure and simple gullibility and desperate hope without
thought. 25 million copies of how to get out of debt books were
really sold? You honestly have "old and unwanted gold" to
be exchanged for pittance of what it's worth? My real problem is just
trying to digest that there are that many people who are capable of
entertaining such ridiculous ideas. How many bad decisions did it
take you to get into that much debt before it dawned on you a
commercial at 4 in the morning is your last hope?
So, realizing that a character from a
cartoon was making me anxious, I turn to Bill O'Reily. People like
Bill are the reason I get anxious and maybe even afraid, although
it's not fear in the classical sense, it's of something ominous or
shadowed by his "personality" and rhetoric. Again, I find
myself thinking that places like Fox news exist, and that scares me.
It would be too easy to go on some diatribe compiling all the stupid,
racist, and ignorant things from the various talking heads at the
station, so I hope to not confuse my purpose by bringing them up. I
just want to know if anyone else feels this. Just knowing that people
like that exist. So brazen, confident, pious, and ignorant; always
smiling the brightest. Being able to feel comfortable saying that a
festival called God and the Nation (or whatever it was called) with a
presidential plane fly over was not an issue about separation of
church and state because the words "church and god are not the
same thing."
I've heard that it is condescending to
think you have some sort of special knowledge and to believe that no
amount of discussion or reasoned argument will ever change a
believers mind. I honestly at this point can't understand why I was
almost sold on this idea. It doesn't just have to be bad ideas and
hypocrisy about your deity, it can be about absolutely anything. It
probably isn't just a coincidence that the majority of the same views
are held by the same kinds of people I have little to no respect for,
and that's what fascinates me more. I get that at times we can all be
hypocritical or contradictory. With that said, I generally see that
happening when it comes to either confusion about your own position
or getting lost in word play depending on who your talking to.
There's a scale of "reasonable," or perhaps better said,
expected, hypocrisy and contradictions to me. When it comes to things
that can be objectively verified and described, and you decide
"simply hold a different opinion" to me, you've committed
suicide.
How can one sacrifice their own mind?
Guilt is my immediate answer. I guess I wonder more about how you can
live like that? What's it like to constantly selectively hear, deny,
and stress about things that you know deep down make sense and have
always made sense. Whoever has the power to lay down such a guilt
trip makes you march to their drum. ::coughs:: religion ::coughs::.
On that list of scary things, when I watch stadiums filled with
bright eyed believers packed in to hear the same damn message over
and over again. You'd think this all encompassing eternal love
wouldn't need such vehement testaments to and reminders of its
existence if it was really there.
So you have these sacrificed guilty
sacks listening to voices in their head about how they should behave.
This doesn't bother you? If that voice isn't their reason or isn't
honest, it may as well be random. You have people who are compelled,
truly compelled by Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, VenomfangX...why? They
have given up on reason. The refuse to think. So what does this mean
for the rest of us? Do I just get to complain in blogs until my
fingers tire? The reasonable, objective, and learned among us go toe
to toe with them. We waste our time refuting their "arguments."
We rock to the sway of the collective moronic decisions they make and
try to cut a path that feels like its honest and worthy. It kills me
to think that those who are smart are destined to not trust, stress
out, and waste their time on people who could never appreciate them,
while the rest go on celebrating their ignorance. We shouldn't feel
comfortable watching 7-30 second sound bites about what's going
through the House and Senate. There shouldn't be a months worth of
tributes, news casts, and articles on a dead pop singer.
It's weird because I can hold seemingly
too very contradictory feelings when I think about this. On one end,
I feel like I should give up or am somehow fated to deal with the
unending stress of fighting through a greedy, ignorant, and frankly
pointless world. Despite this, I still know enough about myself that
I will still go to the ends of the Earth if I truly see a way for me
to succeed and help those I know are worthy enough to succeed as
well. I have to believe that the people who can empathize with this
are looking for their opportunities as well, and I'd like to make it
easier. Or there's the complete opposite disaster scenario, nobody
cares. I really have no recourse but to write and keep trying.
"I wanna feel weightless, and that
should be enough."
