[244] It's All About The He Said She Said

Watching Morgan Spurlock’s old show 30 Days is arousing many a thought in me. What I can state right off the bat is how bad…terrible…atrocious people are at arguing. It truly boggles the mind how little someone can know about something and then passionately rally in favor of their opinion. (Insert irony now.)

In case you don’t know, 30 days pits one “I hate this or that” kind of person and puts them in the middle of whatever they hate. If you’re a minute man, you get put into a house of illegal immigrants; an atheist gets housed with Christians etc. What you get is 25 days of arguing, and usually about 5 where the person opting for the experience finally appreciates that other people are human and everyone wants the same things.

What kills me is that it’s the exact same problem that all of these people face. They all get passionate and start yelling the same catch phrases over and over. Then they get exposed to more and more reality, and they leave, still pretty stupid, but with the confused look a dog gets on their face when they really thought you threw the ball.

To me, it shouldn’t take 30 days of yelling stupid things back and forth to get people to understand something. Call me naïve, I must be. What kills me is that most of these candidates that volunteer themselves for the 30 days aren’t even just kind of passionate about their hatred for the other side, they’re pretty ill-informed about life in general. The christian living with muslims doesn’t know what wasabi is, the mom who binge drinks to teach her kid a lesson doesn’t know what a roofie is, and the straight guy who takes his shirt off in a gay bar doesn’t understand why some of the guys might get the idea to hit on him.

If I really want my ideas to take over the world, I’ve got my work cut out for me. I somehow need to act as dumb as everything around me, yet engineer the words or the situations to play out in my favor. This could be as easy as implementing public policy, to as hard as learning about the specific backgrounds and dispositions of a specific group of people. It’s doable, but fuck.

What bugs me the most is that I don’t necessarily consider myself special or somehow more privy to knowledge than the middle class people I yell at on the idiot box. Why am I able to read, google, take time out of my day to humble myself and be honest about what I do and don’t know, and these people can’t? It’s not like my parents had long intellectual-esc talks with me growing up. I didn’t kick it with the wise janitor in high school. What allows me to seek and respect ideals that, while obviously selfish, simply exist beyond my ability to get pissed off and whine about how I feel? Maybe I can put it in pill form…

For as willing as I am to argue or spend time writing these blogs, I more often than not just shut the hell up. I don’t actually like to look foolish, which is why I try to stick towards saying things I can defend. How do you teach shame and humility? How do you stop people from feeling so damn entitled? No matter how many times you scream “It’s my human right! This is absolutely true!” You’re still wrong. At the very least, you should be honest about your ability and likelihood of being wrong.

It really is a war of ideas, and if you can actually be made to see the state of the world, look at what they reap. It’s apparently the best idea to be a screaming child your entire life, completely unaware or scared of reality, getting by with your fingers crossed that your meager existence will be rewarded because you feel good about yourself right before you die.

You’re only entitled to death. You don’t really own anything. Every single idea you’ve ever had is influenced by something previous. Maybe if you weren’t so entrenched in your hateful ideas, you could flow into a place of understanding without everyone looking this stupid along the way.

But hey, majority rules and if stupid’s in, it’s here to stay. And less we forget; it’s not like you ever had a choice.