jus’ call me “Claire Voyant”.
The only problem with option B, of course, is to be 100% absolutely no doubt correct you have the right person. I would be more worried about that than about legal consequences.
Great post, Cervaise.
I think many people enjoy being brutal and vicious, for whatever reason. Maybe it fulfills some instinct. So they look for justification. They are overjoyed when they find an example of someone they can be brutal and vicious to without feeling guilty. They are testing their own boundaries. And this is quite frightening, because from looking at history it becomes clear that the boundaries of human brutality and viciousness are not much protection at all, once someone decides that brutality and viciousness are justified. That is why I don’t believe it is all just talk. It may be mostly talk, but on some level these people are experimenting - they are putting their vicious instincts out there, and seeing if they are considered justified by others. At which point other people who crave justification for their own vicious instincts applaud them, and go to look for more awful stories that their intuition tells them will end up providing more justification for their viciousness.
Nightime: Good post on your part also. Right now I’m wondering what faith these people claim to follow. Wouldn’t that be an interesting Q&A?!
Monty, you ever played Grand Theft Auto? I think by now that shit can be considered FAITH. Consider our heirs: makes Dirty Harry look like blessed Occam of old.
Incidentally, I just got onto Staunton Island. Had a late start. I got better.
Never played it.
You really think killing/maiming/torturing somebody would make you feel happier in the long run??? :eek:
As a gut instinct then maybe, just maybe. As a considered opinion - I repeat :eek:
And as for what is valid expression and what is not - I could answer that to everyone who disagrees with me and in my mind it’s missing the point somewhat.
I agree. The question is not “would you prefer A or B” - the question is, which one is right?
And that question needs to be answered rationally, not emotionally.
I can understand the emotional drive for vengeance. I’m a human being (or at least, I can pass for one in a dim light), I understand the entirely human urge to hit back at people who’ve hurt me. But wanting to do it doesn’t make it right.
Mr. B but the great black out of 2003 did not have widespread looting and raping and pillaging. So maybe, just maybe, society is a little better than we think it is.
Great post Cervaise
Zebra: <shrug> Just one very localized opinion.
I concur, wholeheartedly. The OP’s generally about wishing death, assrape or maiming on others. I’m trying to get at the catharsis of just saying/typing/feeling bad stuff. Not exactly rational behavior in itself, but valuable nonetheless.
Thanks for the compliments, guys.
See, I don’t think it is, by a long shot. I live in Seattle, a bigger-than-average city (with big-city pretentions) in the United States, and based on my reading of history, I think I live with a degree of freedom, safety, and cultural variety that is absolutely unprecedented in the world. I will agree that there is the perception of moral corruption and criminal danger, but I think it’s a misperception for the reasons I stated previously: The modern media brings to us every sad, violent, and/or tragic event on the planet within hours or even minutes of its occurrence. A disgruntled ex-employee shoots up a warehouse in Illinois, a baby falls down a well in Utah, a facilities manager in Georgia tries to demonstrate the strength of his skyscraper’s windows but picks the wrong one and plunges to his death, a hundred people die of dysentary in Southeast Asia, an airliner overshoots the runway in Nigeria and another hundred people die, and so on, and so on, and so on. These things have always happened. We just didn’t find out about them immediately.
Seriously. Stop watching TV news. Stop internalizing the diet of blood and mayhem that makes you think society is falling apart. It isn’t, really, except to the degree that our perception that it is makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Live for what actually affects you. Pay attention to what’s actually going on in your own space. Yes, drunk driving is a problem, because we have the media and the instant-communication technology to measure it reliably. But have you, personally, been impacted by it? Statistically, some people here on the SDMB will have been, but they’ll be a minority. Doesn’t make it any easier for them, personally, but has it ever actually affected you?
What, really, is going on in your immediate sphere? Do you fear for your life on a daily basis for any practical reason? Has one of your neighbors been robbed, or raped, or murdered? Do you even know your neighbors? Not just recognize them by face so you can offer a guarded smile and a wave when they pull into their driveway, but by name, birthday, and activity? And if not, if the people who live their lives a hundred feet from you are basically strangers, why not? Maybe you think it was cool to know your neighbors fifty years ago, but now it isn’t safe, because you don’t know who they are. Isn’t that a vicious circle?
The idea that things used to be better, and that they’re terrible now, is called the “nostalgia trap.” And what’s more, it’s bullshit. It isn’t true. There will always be problems. Always always always. Things will never be perfect. Never never never. The only difference between then and now is, we can’t ignore the onslaught of information that reveals those problems to us. When the United States was founded, almost everybody died within about ten miles of where they were born, because it was just too difficult to get anywhere when the only overland transportation was on foot (or, if you were lucky or rich, using horses or other animal power). Likewise, the only news you got was word-of-mouth, or via pamphlets or limited broadsheets that carried brief summaries of national news and a lot more information for the local community. There was no television, no radio, no telephone, no email. If somebody didn’t tell you to your face or put it in your hand, you didn’t know about it. Maybe you heard two months after the fact that Old Crazy Melvin three counties over was discovered burying bodies in his yard. You certainly wouldn’t be able to watch, live via satellite, while a pig farm hundreds of miles away was excavated by the authorities.
The book you need to read is The Way We Never Were, which explodes the myth of the nuclear family in American tradition, along with its attendant sub-myths about teen pregnancy, drug use, welfare, and more. Even before you’re done, you’ll be questioning issues beyond those addressed by the book, all of which are covered by the nostalgia trap: race, crime, politics, and everything else we lament now as having fallen from the ideal of some nonexistent Golden Age.
In fact, I’ll go further: It’s a natural human impulse to believe that what’s going on now is what matters, that this moment in which we’re living is when all the important stuff is occurring. It’s where the nostalgia trap comes from. It’s why religious zealots always predict the Second Coming or whatever other prophecy is important to their faith will be happening within their lifetimes. (When was the last time you heard a cult figure predict we’d be seeing Christ or whoever “in ninety-two years, which will be after you’re dead, so make sure to tell your grandchildren”? Doesn’t happen.) High-school students today are more likely to give credence to the idiotic moon-landing hoax argument than are people who were around to watch it, simply because it Came Before and Didn’t Happen “Now.”
You can combat this, though. Read some history. You’ll be staggered at how little has changed, and in fact at how much better things really are, objectively speaking. Anarchists throwing bombs in an urban center? Well, how about the Haymarket affair? Or: Government hamstrung by partisan bickering? Stalled economy? Fear and/or distrust of immigrants? None of this is new. In fact, it’s doubly pathetic how not-new it is, and how crazy everybody gets thinking they’re the first people to cope with these stresses. The only differences today are (1) cosmetic, i.e. instead of railroad barons we have telecommunications moguls; and (2) communication, i.e. when something big happens we know instantly and get to share in the crisis mentality, taking our place in a vast, moaning mob. For example, do you have an opinion about O.J.'s guilt or innocence? If you do: Why?
I keep hearing that society is going to hell in a handbasket, and I just don’t buy it. People have been saying that forever. I used to have bookmarked a page with a translated inscription from a millennia-old Sumerian tablet expressing the same sort of sentiment. So, yes, at the moment, my government is headed by a guy I don’t like, and I think he’s doing damage of various kinds in the international community. Yes, parts of the environment are suffering. Yes, there’s a possibility some overzealous wingnut will kill thousands of people with a nuclear or biological device. It’s probably inevitable, in the long view. But we will live on. We may not like the way we live on, and we will need to mourn our losses, deal with the consequences, and figure out what to do next — but, for the foreseeable future, we will live on.
So — and this is where we come full circle to the issue raised in the OP — quit moaning about other people’s lives, whose individual mistakes, miscalculations, and tragedies have nothing to do with yours. Take an honest look at your own life. Take responsibility for your own mistakes, miscalculations, and tragedies. Each of us is simultaneously utterly insignificant, in the sense that if you die today the sun will rise tomorrow, and the most important person in the universe, in the sense that you’re the only person who can make a difference in your own experience. Reconciling this paradox, in my view, is the key to a happy life. Obsessing about other people is a waste of energy.
Dear Cervaise,
A fine post, very eloquently written (as usual) and framed in a most reasonable yet provocative way. You have unfortunately assumed a great many things about me that simply aren’t true. I don’t watch TV News and it’s not the blood and mayhem that make me think society is a mess. You live in Seattle, I used to live in Boulder, Colorado. The two places are of a similar mindset and have reasonable, self-actualized people running the works and walking the streets. I live in Los Angeles now, due to a family crisis that required my immediate intervention. My wife and I are now very well stuck in the WORST place in the country, and one quite symbolic of all the horrible, screwed-up problems in the U-S-of-A.
Further, I am not now, or have I ever been caught in a “nostalgia trap.” Things are generally a lot better now, on a functional level, than at any other time before. It’s not the TIMES’S fault we now have problems like haroshi or Chronic Fatigue because we don’t know what to do with our free time. It’s our fault; we live in an era where we should and do know better than to invade sovereign nations, or that we have enough food and riches and labor to make everyone here happy. But instead we while away the time in little cubicles, never really knowing what it means to be American.
That’s what I meant by “culturally bankrupt": what exactly is our culture? What is our heritage? Do we stand up and plant the flag in Imperialism? Is that a culture? Do we look to Jesse James and Emperor Norton for our cultural background – or do we step back and take a look at what we’re really all about?
I propose we Dopers take some time to form a Mission Statement about what we are trying to accomplish here in this country. I know I have very grand visions for our society. My wife says it’s impossible. My father says I’m a rock-headed idealist. But if you look to the rest of the country, who are watching the TV News and who look to Hollywood as the shining Grail, it seems we have no choice but to build a true ideal, our own Golden Dream for America.
I am first-generation American. My parents were immigrants and I honor the struggles they endured to get me where I sit today. My generation seems to have lost this idea, though, as well as the ideas of community and charity. I find it telling that many Mexican Americans will choose to use the Spanish comunidad in an English sentence because “community” has been so undermined. Let us look to the past with clear minds and conviction and keep our shoulders to the future. Let us look to the Inca, the Cherokee, the Tlingit for ways to make our societies sustainable and positive. Let us all invent America.
…sorry, tapped the wrong key. It’s karoshi.