Are you saying we don’t have any other sexual/violence taboos but that? Because it doesn’t really feel that way…
In terms of portrayals of said acts, I don’t think so. I was thinking specifically about media and entertainment, I guess.
Television. The means by which I am controled by the dark side. I love it so but I know that it lies to me all the time or, at least, tells me only what I want to hear. Fortunately we have the internet now. The internet would never lie to me.
The gaping chasm between what we think we are getting for our tax money and the way it is actually used. I have spent my whole career correcting it one deal at a time. But when I consider the vast ocean of deals I never see, I am thoroughly disheartened.
And this really affects everything discussed above. We think the police (or CPS) will protect a child who is being sexually abused. (Only if a protective parent has six figures to spend on lawyers, and even then they’ll be forced to visit under supervision.)
We think that welfare should make abortion unecessary. (Yet families regularly starve through the last week of the month.)
We think that politicans are being paid to support our interests, or at least the long-term interests of the country. (In fact their political careers are spent catering to those who provide campaign funds to get them re-elected to continue their political careers . . .)
We think that infrastructure is being built to support the wellbeing of the electorate. (The most cursory review of any public project reveals the extent to which developers and large business control the outcome.)
The list goes on.
I meant to add - we jumped the shark when the Supreme Court decided that “Eminent Domain” could be used to knock down a home (and pay only market price for it) in order to build a retail establishment.
Politics. We have elected a class of individuals who hold themselves to be above and separate from those who elected them.
(Yet families regularly starve through the last week of the month.)
As someone living on food stamps, there is no good reason for this at all. It comes from people spending their money on soda and TV dinners at the beginning of the month, instead of taking my model and getting a 20lb sack of potatoes. Some people I know just can’t get it through their heads that they can’t eat like they have a job if they don’t actually have a job. In three states I’ve lived in, and even for some time on the street, the only people I’ve seen literally starving are those who make the choice to.
The genocide of the Native Americans.
I am in South Africa right now, and the parallels to the American West are astounding. The same prarie schooners and pioneers in gingham and bonnets. The same old time saloons and fake tourist boom towns.
But the big difference is the original ihabitants of South Africa are still here. They even now hold power in what is becoming an exhuberently multicultural nation.
Where are ours? Where is their power?
We always ask “What if Hitler won? What if genocide worked?” The answer is that it looks like a nice, prosperous, peaceful thing: us.
The replacement of “we” with “me”. We are no longer a country of the bell curve.
Being one of the pack, in the middle, isn’t good enough.
For at least a generation now, we’ve been teaching people that THEY are what is important. Timmy has been taught that his needs come first, at the expense of others. The Army advertises - Be an Army of One!! Holding the door for someone and letting others merge into traffic gets you gently mocked for being Minnesota Nice.
The survival benefits of cooperative living seems to have been removed, and we are seeing the results at many levels.
To me what is bothersome is the seeming lack of empathy and second chances for people who make mistakes or get caught up a in bad situation.
If you lose your job in the recession, then lose your house your credit falls apart. So employers won’t hire you both because you are unemployed already and have bad credit.
So many other examples about health care, criminal justice, the media, etc. to name. But there does seem to be a bit of a throw away society where we assume if something bad happens to you then you deserved it.
But realistically do other cultures have that mentality? I don’t know, I haven’t traveled enough. But here in contemporary America we seem to lay all the blame and responsibility on the person suffering hardship, and have no interest in helping them recover.
The dark underside to our society is slippery, greasy, black and smelly.
It’s called oil. We’re totally dependent on it - addicted to it - and there is virtually nothing good about it. It is polluting the environment, and enriching countries like Saudi Arabia. So many of our problems can be traced to our dependence on this evil substance. And there is not nearly enough of an effort to stop.
They’re not exactly lizard people but psychopaths do exist and they are very good at camouflaging themselves and making you think they’re normal people. It’s those rare instances when the mask is pulled away, especially when they’re in positions of power, when you realize shitisfucked.
This thread. A few days ago I thought there were only one or two creepy undersides to our society. As I read this thread I keep going , “yep, that’s creepy too.” Thanks, I’ll be hiding under my bed.
There is no dark underside of our society.
As a matter of fact; it’s all dark.
Perhaps if 99% of the Jews dying in the Holocaust were wiped out by disease, sure.
People seem all too content to lose any freedom or dignity if it maintains their illusion of safety. While certainly not new, this insidious homunculus on our back and the people who feed it weigh us down.
Obviously it is not an exact parallel and not meant to be. The point remains, we are what happens if the bad guys win: life goes on, everyone forgets, and it becomes at best a single unit in elementry school history. I think I remember a little side bar about the trail of tears in fifth grade.
The fundamental underpinning of our nation, the land we build our great cities, our schools full of blonde girls in pigtails, our legendary highways and car culture, our malls and fields and hamburger stands, is based on a very sad story of death, theft and the end of peoples. Without the deaths of millions, without theft on a scale barely imaginable, America would not exist. This is our original sin. This is the dark side of our birth.
This isn’t a liberal guilt thing. It’s not about assigning blame or feeling bad or any kind of politics. It is not saying anything could have or should have been different.
But it is easy to forget. English is a foreign language on our land. We are cousins to the Boers, but we saw the mission to the end where they failed. We are the rarely seen result of a completed colonialism. This is our story, our very first story.
I’m way beyond “amazed” and disappointed at America, and resigned to que sera, sera.
Negroes.
I am so going to Hell . . .
I for one distrust ‘‘education’’. Or at least as it now exists. True education died in the 60’s replaced by liberal indoctrination.
Everybody has heard the joke about the guy asking everybody on the project what 2+2 is and getting a variation on 4 from everybody but the lawyer. Now nobody feels bound by 4 and wants to know what is in it for them to make it something else.
In the 50’s science was taught as a method. Now it is one more body of facts to be changed to fit agendas.