I never thought that this would be a subject I would write on, considering my overindulgence in the past, but I suppose it is something that needs to be acknowledged at some point.
People have gone bat shit crazy. That is the synopsis. It has been a long time in the works, and it is going to continue where people are going to get more and more extreme in their behavior, and with no end in sight.
Image by Steve.D.Hammond.
When I was a kid in the 80′s, there were things constantly happening to push our species to the next level of intelligence or technology. Then the Storm came(Desert, of course). Growing up in a generation where fighting & G.I. Joes was cool, it doesn’t surprise me when we have extreme actions going on now. It has only been something that has been popularized and pushed into our heads where we can be the first to do something, get our names in the history books, make our way into the public view like brass knuckles through a pillow. A violent society escalating at an exponential pace. Didn’t our mothers always tell us that video games would rot our brains?
We see tragedies like the Aurora shooting happening more now, perpetrated by psychotic loners or brilliant people on medications. It’s becoming an every-week type of thing. People that just can’t handle reality find ways to get guns and ammunition, and then create havoc in a public spectacle. Here is this kid that read comic books, subliminally creating a persona wrapped around violent tendencies that one day unravels and he/she spins like a top, working day and night on a plan to be the next antihero. They go to a store, buy them out of their energy drinks, grab a few guns, and put on a horrible show for the world to see and analyze. And then the public feeds on it like a starving badger(or in a ravenous fashion, how I would imagine a badger would devour food when starving). That isn’t the end though.
People don’t analyze the facts much anymore, have you noticed this? They look at the few clues they are offered and buy into whatever point of view the person on television tells them to. It has become a lazy society that doesn’t pay much mind to thought and questions and relies more on statistical data & numbers. Then the extreme happens. Again and again. It’s almost like no one expects it to, but look at ourselves in our most minimal extreme behavior: overeating, energy drinks, an incessant need to own everything, the list goes on and on. The extreme behavior we see today can be traced back to the things we once thought were “cool.” These things could have been those comic books, those G.I. Joes, those Desert Storm collectors cards that showed us that there was no one that could tell us that we were the wrong ones, the ones that needed some form of accountability, maybe take the blame instead of pass it on to the next person. Instead, we climb over each other, just trying to interrupt everyone else by talking louder than them and pushing our point(another form of extremism) and not listening to something. My parents taught me a very valuable lesson years ago in that if I took responsibility for my actions, the punishment would be considerably less than if I abdicated myself from it. They also told me that if I shut up for a few minutes, I could not only hear, but listen & understand. Not many people have that latter fact in mind when I look at everyday life and waiting your turn to speak rarely comes into play.
Now we have people assholes shooting people up left and right in the country as if it has become the next fad. A bunch of selfish pricks that can’t take the fact that they have day to day issues, take it out on a relatively innocent group of people, and then blame it on the pills or insanity or both. No accountability. There are people locked up for saying the wrong things(in the eyes of a watchdog) and no charge being brought to them(did Assange & Manning get any charges yet? Oh. Didn’t think so). Just detention and no one cares because they are watching the news and another group of people just had their lives tragically ended.
It’s a funny thing called misdirection. It is almost a battle tactic, you can micromanage so many people with it provided it is done correctly. Misdirection is the new propaganda, easily seen in the dilapidated focus of our society. Many people have an attention span of comical proportions, almost to the point of Dory in the movie “Finding Nemo.”
Now that your attention has been somewhat skewed, the fact still remains that we, as a society, are looking at a monumental movement from normality & moderation to extreme behavior. It doesn’t have to be like that though. We can attempt to find a middle ground where we aren’t some gun-toting crazy looking for a spree on bath salts. Maybe it is something that we used to do a long time ago, and it took some time, a lot of thought, and a little peace & quiet.
Knowledge of self is something that has been overlooked by much of the populace for some time, and there are many that don’t care to seek that knowledge out until it is too late. It is something that you can question and answer with certainty. It is something that is truly yours and yours alone. We rarely have the time to think in this fast-paced world we live in(isn’t it funny, we created these computers and machines as tools to simplify, but yet we have seemingly less time than before), so when we do have the time, think about something, an ideal if you will. It might make the insanity of life diminish some.
It’s called being comfortable in your own skin.
