Open Mind

Open thread #11 is getting very big, so here’s a new one for faster loading.

Here’s a new open thread.

Also a notice: I’ve been so intensely busy lately I haven’t had much time for the blog. This condition will continue for at least another week (I hope, not much longer than that), at which time I intend to resume blogging on a regular basis. In the meantime, carry on with discussion; I’ll try to be diligent moderating comments.

Yesterday I looked for something to watch on TV. After rejecting the soap operas and talk-TV, I settled on what looked like a crime drama. In the opening scene, three kids (two boys and a girl, in their early teens) are on a playground when they’re accosted by three other kids. The victims try to walk away, but the thugs pursue them, insult them, then demand the girl give up her cell phone. She pleads, “Please, I don’t want to lose it.” The psycho thug replies, “What’d you call me? Loser?”

Then he takes out a gun. After threatening them while talking trash, he shoots the girl. Then he makes the two boys get on their knees, and shoots them in the head.

It was in fact some kind of crime drama. I didn’t watch because I was sickened by the opening. Who the hell — who in his right mind, with even the slightest shred of decency — would think that this, on TV for all to see (including kids), is entertainment? Maybe you can tell, I’m upset about it.

My wife is also upset, for a different reason. She enjoys online gaming in a virtual world called “Second Life.” It enables people to create characters and interact in numerous ways, mostly good clean (and sometimes very bawdy) fun. But the one thing she doesn’t like is something called “Gor.” It’s fantasy slave ownership and abuse. Some enjoy pretending to be the master, some enjoy pretending to be the slave. Yesterday she encountered a shop which sells “skins” (textures and colors for one’s character), but this shop featured skins which show bruises, lacerations, wounds, so that people can enhace their fantasies of being physically abused by their “owners.”

This too is thought by some to be “entertainment.”

I understand the thrill of danger, the excitement that accompanies the forbidden. I understand indulging one’s reptilian brain at the expense of reason. But I had hoped that human beings were different from beasts, in that we understood that the thrill of the senses was inferior and the power of spirit and intellect was superior. That we could rise above our animal ancestry, forbear that which hot blood craves in favor of higher pursuits; that we could not just strive for, but actually achieve, nobility. I wonder.

Then I get a comment like this: “While we are all aguing about whether or not, the reality is you are not going to stop this from ocuring! You are all talkers of the great time waste.“

This too makes me wonder. Is the human race so blind? Is there no hope? Do we not even deserve to be saved from ourselves?

My spirit despairs at such resignation. And the fact that I’ve recently been assaulted by bad TV portraying the worst kind of cruelty as a prelude to entertainment, that my wife has witnessed the willingness of people, for the sake of a cheap thrill, to invite the kind of abuse that should never be tolerated, doesn’t help.

But I have a message for every nay-sayer and advocate of “there’s nothing we can do about it.” I refuse to resign. I do not accept the inevitability of failure. But the way I feel right now, it takes a lot of audacity to be hopeful.

I accept that global warming is going to be a lot of pain for a lot of people. But I will allow my intellect to overrule my anger because it knows that what we do does make a difference. The more we change for the better, the better the future will be. Although the future is not likely to be good, there’s no excuse for not doing what we can to prevent its being worse.

If you don’t want to do anything about global warming … get the hell out of the way of those of us who do.

As was pointed out, some threads are getting prohibitively long. So here’s an open thread to continue discussion.