WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO EVERYONE
What the hell happened to, well, everyone? It’s as if the whole planet has lost it’s damn mind.
Oprah announced she’s quitting her talk show. Tyra Banks is quitting her talk show. More shocking than that announcement is that she was ever allowed to have a show in the first place. Someone keeps letting Alicia Keys release new music. Megan Mullally, who’s impressive resume includes a Broadway role in the 1994 revival of Grease as well as her memorable stint as the lovable, pill popping drunk Karen Walker on the NBC sitcom Will and Grace, is pushing I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. Seriously, she is selling butter to the tune of a reworded version of Gloria Estefan’s Turn the Beat Around.
“Turn the tub around” she croons out, prompting consumers to turn the tub around to “come see what we’ve found, it’s what you’ve been wishin’! Big transition, fresh butter taste yes that’s here, no hydrogenated oils so there’s no trans fats here!”
Is this really what it’s come to Megan? Hawking butter for a couple grand?
Tiger Woods, a nerdy golf freak, has tuned out to be a billionaire man-whore who has fucked anything with a hole. Seriously, I don’t even remember it happening but, the DNA from the rape kit shows at some point he snuck into my apartment and screwed me. He’s probably had sex with you too, assuming your white.
Despite losing over 11,000 jobs last month alone, economist concoct obscure formulas to continue to proclaiming the recession is over. Twelve people in the country still own their own homes, everyone else is loading U-Hauls and moving under expressway overpasses.
Some moron on a “no fly list” easily steps aboard a plane loaded with explosives in, of all places, his underwear band. Instead of pointing the finger of blame at the multiple intelligence organizations who all failed to notice this we are now banned from using pillows or covering up with blankets during flights. We are banned from accessing carry on luggage and nobody is allowed to use the facilities within an hour of landing. We’re going to step up the use of racial profiling, implement mandatory frisking of travelers departing from a list of seven countries determined to be hotbeds for terrorism and start using full body scanners to see through traveler’s clothing.
“What if known extremists on ‘no-fly-lists’ are simply are banned from flying?” One might ask.
“You damn fool!” Clearly that is to simply and much to inexpensive. Theatrics and over the top paranoia are deemed most effective.
I’m not against enhanced security. I support it. Anything to make flying safer. The only way I want to die on a plane is when one of the wings falls off or the pilot is to drunk to land on the runway.
Further proof the whole planet has lost it’s damn mind is the fact that we are even talking about someone trying to blow up a plane over Detroit. Perhaps terrorist haven’t been keeping up on current events but, Detroit isn’t really the economic / social hub it once was in the 60’s. I’ve flown over Detroit before and it looks like it has already been bombed. One would think a terrorist with a window seat might lean over to his partner and conclude an earlier shift had already raged a jihad on the area.
The climate crisis convention in Copenhagen was a welcome relief in all the madness. Until that meeting of the world’s great minds I wasn’t sure we had talked about global warming enough. Copenhagen got world leader’s together to talk the shit out of global warming. They talked it into the ground. Nothing got accomplished of course, “Drill Baby Drill” is still the nations mantra, but thank goodness we discussed the fact that there seems to be a problem. A problem without ample discussion and lackluster action simply isn’t a problem.
I am relieved that the twenty-plus year ban on HIV-Positive individuals traveling into the United States has finally been lifted, thus allowing the World Aids Conference to be held in the U.S. We haven’t been talking about Aids enough as of late and I wasn’t sure it was still a problem. Perhaps we can resolve to have the 2011 model Hummers come equipped with used syringes that way we can just finish ourselves off quicker.
I’m not claiming to know everything, but I do know this: humans haven’t solved a single problem since we started walking upright and waxing excess hair from our genitals. We haven’t solved a single problem without replacing it with something equal to or greater than the problem we eliminated. The horse drawn carriage to the horseless carriage gets people across town in half the time. We can leave Detroit and be in Toledo in less than two hours but my god it sure is starting to get freaking hot in here, isn’t it? We have treatments for cancer that if implemented promptly can almost guarantee to save a life. It’s just so damn expensive nobody can afford it unless you’re insured or happen to have a home you can remortgage. We have antibiotics that cure illness but also create antibiotic resistant strains of the same illness that are increasingly harder to treat.
Until now, however, replacing a problem with another problem wasn’t really…a problem. Innovations have always created unintended obstacle but we glared into the eyes of those obstacles and had the resolve to fix them. It seems as of late though we have a docket of problems piling up that we really have no desire to fix. We’ve become very ho-hum about things. We could power cars with renewable energy but, it’s just to much work to implement a new energy infrastructure. If we had electric cars where would people charge them? Do you know how much work it would be to not only locate property to build charging stations on but to build the actual charging station? We could fix our healthcare system but crossing one’s fingers and hoping to make it 70+ years without illness seems a better solution to the problem. Plus, it’s much cheaper.
I’m not sure how to end this as I have no idea what to do about, well, anything. Perhaps, though, what we can try to do is stop pointing fingers at everyone else who isn’t responsible for our problems and take charge of them ourselves. I have spent the last twenty-some years blaming so many people for so many of my problems when I have the power within myself to fix them; all I need to do is get off my ass and do it. So, for 2010, I plan to get off my the aforementioned ass of mine and doing something these problems. Nobody else charged my credit cards up and over the limit so nobody else can pay them down. Nobody else dropped me out of school so nobody else can reenroll me. I think 2010 is going to be about personal responsibility for myself, I just hope the rest of the country, perhaps the world, gets a hankering for the same thing.
Peace, and much love -
Michael
