16 December 2012

bumper sticker philosophy.


Okay. See that image above? That, my friends, is what we get when (probably) well-intentioned but (probably) intellectually underequipped people try to establish correlations. Back in the good old days—before we posted our every inconsequential thought and feeling (as well as snapshots of our genitals) on the internet—I probably wouldn't even be aware that people thought this way (in other words: poorly). Oh, yes, I might have suspected that there were a great number of drooling simpletons in the world, but their contorted dogmas wouldn't have been foisted upon me so early in the morning before I'd even finished my first cup of coffee. 

The temptation is there, to be sure. We want simple answers to very complex questions, the same way that we fantasize about gods sitting on clouds in pristine satin robes—in order to feel that our that our chaotic, irreducible lives have some meaning or intelligible plotline.  We've all grown up on storybooks, television shows, and mainstream movies, and as a result our minds automatically grasp for the symbols, the foreshadowings, and the simple causalities that take us from 'once upon a time' to 'happily ever after.' But real life—as few of us need to be reminded—is a lot messier. People suffer and die without purpose. The bad guy sometimes wins. Protagonists suddenly act strangely and out-of-character. And the story never ends—but is followed by epilogue after epilogue after epilogue...

I could say so many things in logical rebuttal to what is on that t-shirt above, but mindless slogans like that (which are as slithery as anything Madison Avenue could produce) really don't deserve logical rebuttal. You have to earn the right to be taken seriously. We're all certainly free to express ourselves as we wish—this being a 'free country' and all—but we really need to be careful. Slogans and talking points have a way of expressing things for us, or in lieu of us. They seem to save us the bother of really having to think about things rigorously for ourselves, but I don't think we can ever be absolved of that responsibility.

14 comments:

  1. There are so many of these idiotic postings on Facebook and elsewhere. I saw one where Samuel L. Jackson was chiding the media for focusing on the shooter rather than the victims. It's almost hilarious. The media focused on the shooter when that's the information it had, then focused on the victims when their names were released a day later. What is his problem? I think he should stick to movies about snakes on planes.

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    1. Or maybe that was Morgan Freeman. Look at me, mixing up black people. I am asshole.

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    2. When I first saw the 'Morgan Freeman' quote, I thought to myself: I'll bet you anything he didn't say that. (Not that it really matters, I guess. The idea should be valid on its own terms, regardless of who said it.)

      P.S. You're racist.

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    3. HAHA! I was once in a restaurant in LA and a woman at my table said "don't all look at once, but there is Samuel L. Jackson". It was Morgan Freeman. White people.

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    4. It's okay, Morais. Sometimes I get you confused with Nelly Furtado.

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    5. I wrote that post! Not Morgan Freeman or Samuel L. Jackson.

      Sexists.

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  2. Thanks for writing this post. People are starting to share Ben Stein's post about God not being allowed in our government, and he even went as far to say Dr. Spock was wrong in telling parents not to spank their children has now raised a society of people with no conscience. How anyone can use violence against your own children as a way of teaching children to not be violent is beyond comprehension. These types of platitudes are so frustrating because they are so pointless and solve nothing. And even worse is that there are truly no solutions to what happened on Friday, and the weekend before in Portland, and in Colorado and every day on the streets of Chicago and all over the country. We can say gun control, and mental health, and on and on, but people will do what people will do. If there's gun control, someone who wants a gun will find a way to get one. If it's mental health, someone will go off their meds. To me there are no answers and having this crap enter the discourse just adds to the futility of the situation.

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    1. There are definitely no easy answers, but I still think stricter gun control would make it more difficult for people to get their hands on dangerous weapons. People will still go on rampages but I still think you'd have fewer victims.

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    2. Hey, I'm all for gun regulations, but they wouldn't have changed this situation nor many others. His mom owned guns and he used them to kill her and 26 others. There are so many guns already in homes and on the streets, I just don't know how someone couldn't access one if they wanted. But I'm probably just feeling overly defeated on this issue based on all the stupid arguments I'm reading vs. find any hope in the one you just gave me.

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    3. I agree, Trish. There are absolutely no solutions. There will always be mentally ill people in our society who behave in unpredictable and violent ways. Many of these people don't have caring friends or loved ones to even notice that they have a problem to begin with—so I can't imagine a mental health awareness campaign will do much good in stopping these mass killings. (But of course such a campaign would be good nonetheless for countless other reasons.) I do, however, believe—and again this is more an article of faith rather than a provable causal relationship—that stricter gun control can or might prevent SOME incidents. In my experience, some mentally ill people are very unmotivated. If there's a gun there, they may impulsively decide to shoot people all of a sudden; if not, they may just act out in some other (less destructive) way. This doesn't apply to all shooters, but I really do believe it applies to some of them—who are overcome by a sudden and extreme rage or depression.

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  3. I get that people feel the need to attach blame to things in order to make themselves feel better, but at some basal level they should realize the absurdity of it. Listening to conservative talk radio is a joke—yesterday they were saying these incidents occur because we don't raise our kids the way we used to, that we're no longer a bunch of neighborly hicks who know each other's business because if we did, then surely this would have been (somehow) prevented.

    People are idiots.

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    1. I hate that argument. I hate how people try to identify individual causes for these things. THESE ARE VERY COMPLEX SOCIAL PROBLEMS, involving numerous variables. The pundits and the talk radio like to simplify it for the braindead because that's all they can absorb. This one thing NECESSARILY leads to this other thing. Society is different today in so many ways from a century ago—some of them good, some of them bad, some of them indifferent but causing other changes we hadn't anticipated. We can't be simpletons about this. We can't become victims of nostalgia and the past. We have to recognize that these are problems that haven't been solved yet because they are complex, extremely difficult problems.

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