Make it Personal

Unspeakable evil is created by groups, where noteworthy good is created by individuals. In the group, individuals absolve themselves of wrongdoing, they distance themselves from being a part of a problem because they are not fully responsible for it. They may be good people as individuals, and they more than likely are, but once inside the group, they become a cog that spins the gears that may power such unspeakable evil. They may be able to sleep at night knowing that they're decent, honest folk, who are by themselves no more guilty than anyone else, but they still go to work everyday to help perpetuate what is evil at worst, and nonsense at best. If they are honest with themselves they realize this, and the knowledge that they are a cog plagues their conscience night and day. Hopefully it inspires them to do some good in the world on their own terms to make up for it.

Those who create our media, the advertisers who exercise no regard for decency in their fight to insult the buying public, are a perfect example. Consumerism is choking the life out of our love and respect for one another, our kindness, and our generosity, all because such things are of trite importance when the emphasis is on selling to human selfishness. Those who produce these spectacles of poor taste have done nothing but intentionally try to turn us against ourselves, turn man against woman, woman against man, adult against child, child against adult, and so on. They produce a relentless barrage of group favoritism that enforces cliched ignorance and antagonism toward the variety of human expression.

They create characters who are as they'd like to see people in society, loathsome and self obsessed, and then perhaps read their children to sleep at night with fairy tales that preach the opposite. They make their living with the intention of pinning one against another, dividing and conquering (so that all may fall), so that they may hawk their company's products at the very people they can get away with putting down or building up, insulting or devaluing. It's a tactic. If you devalue people, then you can get them to value products. These are the same people who may preach to their children about respect and kindness, but work only to produce the opposite.

Troubling still is how those who make and sell products believe they are justified only because of their desire to make and sell quality products to enhance people's lives. It is the engine that perpetuates our standard of living, after all. Doing this, they never have to fathom the desperate depths they have to sink to in order to hawk their "quality products" at the public, and what psychological toll this warfare has on human relationships. They don't have to feel guilty for perpetuating stereotypes in their advertisements, or just being distasteful, because all they see is profit at the expense of what they see as "dumb consumers" eating it up.

They'll be the first to make the case that they are simply reacting to "repressive" political correctness by choosing to be offensive, and may even believe their material to be thought provoking or challenging. This is not so, because something is only offensive when it causes people to reconsider their cultural standards, it is just abhorrent and meaningless when it perpetuates those standards and still manages to offend for pure shock value. The depiction of men in advertising, of fathers in particular, is not offensive, it is abhorrent and sinister.

They'll be the first to liken themselves truth-sayers for "instilling" what they consider to be "critical thought on an area of sketchy acceptability." If such was the case, why not drag this motivation to its natural conclusion? Why not offer us something new to consider, rather than just heaping on the same old nonsense in worsening depravity? How long will it take before our media depicts human blood being splattered over a sandwich like a condiment? How long before we get to see fathers being ritualistically dismembered and devoured by their wives because they surely have no clue about their children's peanut butter preference? How long before we see children gleefully disemboweling their own parents as a form of torture so that they may ring a video game paid for by the credit card clasped in mom's lifeless hand? How long before we see parents shoot their children in the back with a pistol so that they may enjoy the Margarita mixer in peace and quiet? How long before we see the wife stitching together bedsheets she made from her husband's flesh after she skinned him alive? How much more critical thought could be inspired by these eventualities? Is there no low our consumerist culture will overlook to try to hawk their precious little "quality products" in our faces?

The worst, or best, part of it is, we are all implicated in it, not just those who produce this lifestyle. We are all responsible for setting these abhorrent cultural trends in motion, if not because we sold them, but because we bought into them. I say our implication in it may be for the best because it is all the more reason to take personal responsibility for it. When culture decides that it is fair to do the equivalent of public dismemberment for shock value or some twisted sense of humor, when it feels alright turning boys into slugs, men into idiots, girls into sluts, and women into objects or self-righteous bigots, we ought to feel implicated as if we ourselves had offended our loved ones, our sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, parents or friends. When we buy into some campaign that seeks only to put down a segment of the population, we ought to feel as though we just did some horrible misdeed by our loved ones. We ought to feel as though we put stones in our children's hands when they hungered. We ought to feel as though we put black eyes and broken teeth onto those we care deepest about, all so that we could feel good about ourselves--all so that we could feel like "we're worth it."

If we don't make it personal, if we don't take it to heart, if we can't see the faces of our loved ones on those our consumerist lifestyle wants us to make fun of, despise, and demean, then we have absolved ourselves from any wrongdoing, and we succeed only at buying into nonsense. On another level, we may even succeed at buying into and thus perpetuating unspeakable evil against human life. Freedom comes at the expense of human dignity, it is true, and people should have the freedom to buy into whatever they want just as they have the freedom to sell whatever they want, but they should not get away with not feeling guilty for what they have been directly and indirectly responsibility for.

Freedom from want is a right, freedom from guilt is not.