Category: Compassion

Welcome (Back?) To the Age of Superficiality

— Maybe we never left the Age of Superficiality. Maybe it’s always been with us. But was it always so glamorized? Never mind ‘Glamorized’ – it suddenly seems canonized.

— Maybe I didn’t pay attention to a lot of things in the last few years. Maybe I dismissed mindless ‘entertainment’ and ‘infotainment’ as if was totally insignificant. But wait – Somebody is paying attention to this stuff. There are way too many programs celebrating celebrity. Reality TV shows look too much like they were designed to convince us that housewives in every city in this world, especially housewives who believe they are rich and powerful – are complete idiots – and not just idiots, but mean spiteful egotistical bitches who believe they should be able to kill and eat their neighbours as long as some good conservative party member makes a profit in terms of votes for their candidates – or better yet, gold and silver in their untraceable emergency escape fund.

— Remember the song “Dirty Laundry” bu Don Henley? I thought it was brilliant. I thought I could laugh about dumbed down television news and walk away from that and never be bothered by its mindlessness again.

— But now the ‘Bubble headed bleached blondes’ are everywhere – and they’re not necessarily blonde any more – sometimes they are wearing grey hair like badges as they try to get you to spend your hard earned money to buy more life insurance (that the insurance companies welcome as ‘free money’ – maximum input with minimum output for them). – Buy more life insurance than you’d ever need so you can die with a smile on your face, safe in the illusion that your grandchildren will have hundreds of thousands of dollars to deposit as a down-payment toward a multi-million dollar education as the universities of this world become more and more greedy and less and less effective? Remember when we thought that a university education would teach us how to think effectively? Did they ever teach us how to see through shuck?

— Maybe I was able to tolerate the superficiality of many things because I thought they had no impact on the vast majority of the human race. Maybe I believed that average humans were much more intelligent and much more wise than the ‘pundits’ of Madison Avenue gave anybody credit for being. Was I wrong?

— And why, all of a sudden, with the beginning of this New Year – has it become so painful for me to sit in front of a television monitor and see smiling faces of attractive people as they try to appear completely guile-less while they attempt to deceive anybody stupid enough to believe they might be telling the truth as they read their news or sell the garbage we never wanted and never believed we needed until some hyper-attractive young member of the opposite sex smiled at us with his or her eyes dilating at the prospect of engaging in possible sexual fulfillment with the proud owner of whatever it is that they’re trying to sell you at the moment?

— Or am I completely insane to believe that, if for instance, you want to do something for the good of humanity, like feeding starving children in third world countries – or smuggling innocent followers of non-sanctioned religions out from under the military dictatorships in countries where the ‘leadership’ believes they have every right to vivisect anyone who doesn’t follow their proclamations to the letter and then sell their precious bodily organs to the highest bidder –– you should do that anonymously – and you should do it because you know that it pleases God and strengthens everything that makes life on this planet worth living? The fact that you would be doing something selfless and good for the benefit of all life on this planet is one thing. Handing somebody a huge cheque on television, more concerned about how you look while you’re doing it and ‘who you are wearing’ at the time the cameras are rolling is not what charity is all about. Is it?

— And like I hinted at a couple paragraphs up. Why has knowing that this kind of activity is going on become so much more painful in the last two weeks? Have I given up believing in the sanctity and sovereignty of each and every human being on planet Earth?

— Or have I just watched too many television commercials lately and taken them much too seriously?

 – jda –