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Friday, August 16, 2013

Driving, Media, and the Soaring Heights of Being Pathetic

G'day me lovies!  How are yas?  I am a little...well...disturbed.  Let me tell you whyfor.

So, when I am in the car at 5:00 a.m. driving to go for a swim, I need to get all pumped up, right?  You can't just sit there too quietly or the lull will put you back to sleep.  In order for me to get my blood pumping and really get blisteringly fired up, do you know what I do?  Why, I listen to National Propaganda Radio, of course!  (That's NPR for the rest of you.)

Some of you are wondering how this possibly could get me fired up to go swimming and I say to you, HOW COULD IT NOT?!

Sometimes there are interesting things on there, personal interviews and what not.  I like how I can tune in to a station near my college town and hear all about the fun things going on at the library (not that I can attend since it is so far away, but I still get the station in and this makes me feel cozy in the land of happy memories) and at other good-times places.  

But then.  Oh, then.  Then there are times when they are speaking on such fantastic topics that I must yell at the radio and flail my arms around wildly screaming, "What are you THINKING?!  Are you even kidding me right now!?"  I can pretty much swim as fast as dolphins after an episode like that.

One of the more recent episodes that got my blood all pumped up before the workout had to do with the pathetic youth of society today.  Obviously, not all youth are complete dingbats.  I'd say a lot of them will turn out just fine.  But those kinds of people aren't going to get interviewed on National Propaganda Radio, let's get real.

The interviewer was asking 16-18 year olds if they had their driver's licenses.  All but one of them did NOT have a license and didn't care that they didn't.  This was a little pathetic, but their reasons for not having one was exponentially more pathetic and was the reason I felt compelled to begin yelling at the radio.  

Ready for this?  They said that they didn't need to go and hang out with friends because they had social media (facebook, Skype, etc.) instead.  They also said they didn't want to do something with people unless it was media-worthy (a.k.a. to take pictures of themselves pretending  to be hilarious and casual and hysterical and put it on facebook on their timeline).

ARE YOU SERIOUS?  ARE YOU FREAKIN' KIDDING ME?

They don't want to hang out with real live humans and have face-to-face contact with them, they want to hook up into their matrix instead and rock out.  This is so head-slappingly disturbing.

Basically, what has been created is a culture of completely self-absorbed people who truly believe that most of their life is on a stage.  Any other non-stageworthy aspect of their life is pretty much a pile of dung and not worth the effort.  Do you know what this says?  This takes people from the belief that MOST of life is work, MOST of life is everyday, day-to-day humdrum, and turns it into MOST of life ought to be on a stage or skip it.  This is so mental!  

Most of life IS work.  All of those things they don't show on TV or movies is the bulk of life.  You've to got to brush your teeth, take care of others, go to the grocery store, call to sort out things.  What a horrid shock it would be to live thinking the other way around!  Vacation is not a way of life.  It is a piece of life.  A teensy shrivel of it.  If you live seeking thrills, vacation, parties and the like, how seriously disappointed you must be.

This is how the next generation is being built.  Their poor little faces screwed into screens, thinking they should just forget about hanging out with their friends because they'll probably just sit around and talk (and probably not even break out the flourescent wigs and go-go boots, so what is there even to take a picture of for instagram anyway?).

The interview concluded with a dude who admitted that he mostly gets around because his girlfriend drives him around.  He commented, "Twenty years ago that would seem pretty pathetic, but that's just the way it is."

Indeed.  Yes, that is pathetic, little man.  Please, you need to learn how to drive so that you can go to your next party when  you live in a van down by the river.  It's gonna be real, yo.

Peace, love and look up, my friends,
Ms. Daisy

p.s. Just heard something else while on the way home - Disney is making a new toy/video game called "Infinity" (live forever in your avatar, LIVE!) targeted at little kids.  They plug a character toy into the video console and it pops up on the screen.  The toys interact with each other and with the child.  They concluded, "It will probably forever change how kids play."  Great.  Obliterate imagination and free thought at the root.  It is much easier to control a  society living in a quasi-reality, so let's start 'em young, baby!

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