I'm going to admit right now that I don't know as much as I could about the Treyvon Martin murder case. I've followed it a little bit since the day it happened, but haven't really heard any new information about it since then. But I have seen people's reactions to it and, as always, it's kind of ridiculous to see how people are reacting.
Most people who I know might say something like "What George Zimmerman did was horrible and there's very little doubt that he was acting on racial prejudice." and "He should have been arrested on sight." I would agree and I fully understand why people have gotten upset, even those who have nothing to do with any of it. But I feel as if a whole nation has suddenly taken up a cause (like we do so often) just because it's the popular thing to talk about. And it's even worse when we so unanimously seek blood!
I find it scary that a whole nation has suddenly risen up and is now calling for Zimmerman's head on a pike! Yes, he deserves justice. But that's just it! We have a justice system that has to do it's job! If it does it's job poorly then we have a right to complain and things should be changed. But as far as this case goes we really need to pick our battles. Things have to be taken care of one thing at a time. I feel like people need to calm down and stop criticizing a system that hasn't even had time to do it's job. And part of that job is investigating the people involved, and the exact events at the scene of the crime.
Many people feel that the history of these two people are irrelevant to the case. But, in my opinion, there is absolutely no reason why looking at their history is a bad thing. As for Zimmerman, if it proves that he was extremely racist and violent in nature, then it gives fuel to the prosecution. But, theoretically, if he was a peaceful man with no racism that anyone was aware of, then it's going to be a bit harder case to prove. But having all of the information you can is pretty much the only way to prove anything. And there's a possibility that it might prove things that nobody want's to believe.
I think that if we need to look into Zimmerman's past then we should look into Trayvon's past too. Nobody want's to hear that they might find something to prove that Trayvon was somehow not the perfect, upstanding youth that he's so far been portrayed as. And personally, I have no idea who he was. Obviously, he is dead and it's disrespectful to criticize him or dig around to find the negative aspects of his life. But that doesn't mean that we should just assume that he was a perfect saint. He was a kid, and there's no denying that kids don't always act rationally. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, understanding exactly who he was may help explain more of what may have happened on the night of his death!
But what I'm really interested in (as I've said before) is what actually happened at the scene. What do witnesses say? What does the evidence say? Is there any way that we can know exactly how the incident unfolded? So far I've heard very little that can prove any concrete facts. 911 calls are a very good lead, but a 911 call leaves a lot to the imagination.
It's true that looking into these people's pasts and knowing exactly what happened at the scene of the crime will not change anything that actually happened. A young man is dead and it's a tragic loss. But, unfortunately, that fact does not mean that proper insight would not change anything that matters. What matters right now is that the correct people have their facts straight before we sentence a man to death (which is a real possibility in Florida). We cannot be a country that succumbs to Mob Rule.
Edit:
This video by TYT is relevant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F2yMGLHtFGk
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
I hate Hipsters (once and done)
I'm posting this but I'm still sort of working on it. So please excuse the choppy ideas, please excuse any grammar mistakes and please excuse my dear Aunt Sally. It was her birthday yesterday. (no seriously)
I think it's safe to say that we've all heard of hipsters. Most of us have learned to hate them. Many hipsters don't even realize that it's what they are. In truth a hipster would never admit to being a hipster, but I think we are all a little bit hipster sometimes. I honestly don't see TRUE hipsters that often. But you might not see most of them for what they were unless you tried to talk to them. Irony, ironically is a big theme in this post and not just because hipsters think that everything they do is ironic. It's an Irony Inception!... Fuck Hipsters... you ain't ironic... you're pointless... you're like vain Muppets but without a billion dollar franchise!!! Ok... that was my little outburst, and now I'm gonna try to be rational.
The most common opinion that seems to be held by hipsters is that they're better than others because of what they are doing. And this can be said of most extreme views. The general consensus is that hipsters are undisciplined, immature, and childish in their actions. If hipsters are childish, it means that they are selfish and ignorant which means that they're susceptible to hate which results in conflict. I think hipsters were born out of misguided messages being confused by the human instinct to compete.
It's kind of ironic that many hipsters dress and try to act so much like the hippies. Our generation was the one to spawn the hipster, with their selfishness and hate, and yet our elders constantly hammered us over and over with the idea that everyone is equal. Many of us were the children of hippies and the baby-boomer generation. It's easy to see that most of our elders are people who lived and grew up in the 60s. Whether they like it or not, most of our elders were impacted in a major way by the ideals of the hippies. The 60s were all about the hippies! Color TV was getting big and the country was evolving a whole lot. Capitalism was in full swing and mass media as we know it today was still coming into it's own.
One result of the hippies, the 60s, and the evolution of mass media was the refinement and implementation of public broadcasting in America, climaxing with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. In 1968 a show came on the air known as Mr Rodgers Neighborhood. Fred Rodgers, a man sometimes blamed for the problems of our generation, was sort of a hippie himself. He was an educator, a song writer, an author, and a minister. On his show he taught all about peace and love, but he also taught that we are all special. "Everybody is special" is not originally Mr Rodgers' idea, and it's romantic nature has held a lot of appeal for some time. But, as we all know, the hipsters love to be special. Some think that the idea spawned an entire generation who feels a sense of entitlement, but this can't be true.
In my opinion, children develop personalities based on the mistakes that were made by their role models being compared to the ideals that said role-models impressed onto them. This would explain why every generation came out more effed up than the last! It's really confusing when something like, "Love, peace and equality are the key to happiness!" is what our role models are teaching us while they are also telling us that we're special and while they themselves are guilty of hate and ignorance! But I believe that there are extremes in all aspects of society, and hipsters are just one of them. The reasons that we have hipsters are very complicated and can't be simplified by a few sentences, but lets just remember that they're, for the most part, harmless. If we didn't have them, we wouldn't have much to poke fun at. Our generation would just seem sad and under-developed. Unfortunately, for our elders more than anything, human nature is just too powerful to overcome with flowers and protest rallies.
Woodstock was said to be the hippies' big "told you so", and nobody can deny that it really helped their cause. But every attempt to recreate a similar event has failed. Maybe what Woodstock really taught us was that you need loud music and lots of drugs in order to ignore the stupid shit around you and just get on with living. A lot of our generation has adopted a life style based around this and maybe they're not all wrong, but drugs and loud music can't solve everything. To many, drugs are the cause of most major problems. Maybe the problems caused by drugs are just extremes, and again, there are always extremes in any situation. But drugs seem do a whole lot that throws any sort of balance out the window. These extremes have created gateways for a lot of hate, whether it's founded or not. But because many drugs were so new and unstudied when the hippies started experimenting with them, people who hate the hippies have a lot of concrete evidence against them. More evidence than those of us who hate our hipsters.
Ever since the 60s, the idea has been going around that the hippies failed. Many think that their ideas were ill-founded or childish. Obviously anyone who seriously thought that anarchy was a legitimate option for society was misguided. But as the hippies grew up, settled down, and learned some discipline with experience, they didn't necessarily grow out of their ideals. If you look around you'll find hippie ideals in almost every form of media. How ironic that hippies were anti-establishment and anti-big-business and yet the establishments of corporate media have adopted "peace, love and happiness" as the ideal message to send to their audiences. The fact that our generation is practically being saturated by media, marketing, and mixed messages isn't really proving to be helpful to our growth and development. And this is why I feel that the combination of any or all of these problems explains why we have hipsters.
I think it's safe to say that we've all heard of hipsters. Most of us have learned to hate them. Many hipsters don't even realize that it's what they are. In truth a hipster would never admit to being a hipster, but I think we are all a little bit hipster sometimes. I honestly don't see TRUE hipsters that often. But you might not see most of them for what they were unless you tried to talk to them. Irony, ironically is a big theme in this post and not just because hipsters think that everything they do is ironic. It's an Irony Inception!... Fuck Hipsters... you ain't ironic... you're pointless... you're like vain Muppets but without a billion dollar franchise!!! Ok... that was my little outburst, and now I'm gonna try to be rational.
The most common opinion that seems to be held by hipsters is that they're better than others because of what they are doing. And this can be said of most extreme views. The general consensus is that hipsters are undisciplined, immature, and childish in their actions. If hipsters are childish, it means that they are selfish and ignorant which means that they're susceptible to hate which results in conflict. I think hipsters were born out of misguided messages being confused by the human instinct to compete.
It's kind of ironic that many hipsters dress and try to act so much like the hippies. Our generation was the one to spawn the hipster, with their selfishness and hate, and yet our elders constantly hammered us over and over with the idea that everyone is equal. Many of us were the children of hippies and the baby-boomer generation. It's easy to see that most of our elders are people who lived and grew up in the 60s. Whether they like it or not, most of our elders were impacted in a major way by the ideals of the hippies. The 60s were all about the hippies! Color TV was getting big and the country was evolving a whole lot. Capitalism was in full swing and mass media as we know it today was still coming into it's own.
One result of the hippies, the 60s, and the evolution of mass media was the refinement and implementation of public broadcasting in America, climaxing with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. In 1968 a show came on the air known as Mr Rodgers Neighborhood. Fred Rodgers, a man sometimes blamed for the problems of our generation, was sort of a hippie himself. He was an educator, a song writer, an author, and a minister. On his show he taught all about peace and love, but he also taught that we are all special. "Everybody is special" is not originally Mr Rodgers' idea, and it's romantic nature has held a lot of appeal for some time. But, as we all know, the hipsters love to be special. Some think that the idea spawned an entire generation who feels a sense of entitlement, but this can't be true.
In my opinion, children develop personalities based on the mistakes that were made by their role models being compared to the ideals that said role-models impressed onto them. This would explain why every generation came out more effed up than the last! It's really confusing when something like, "Love, peace and equality are the key to happiness!" is what our role models are teaching us while they are also telling us that we're special and while they themselves are guilty of hate and ignorance! But I believe that there are extremes in all aspects of society, and hipsters are just one of them. The reasons that we have hipsters are very complicated and can't be simplified by a few sentences, but lets just remember that they're, for the most part, harmless. If we didn't have them, we wouldn't have much to poke fun at. Our generation would just seem sad and under-developed. Unfortunately, for our elders more than anything, human nature is just too powerful to overcome with flowers and protest rallies.
Woodstock was said to be the hippies' big "told you so", and nobody can deny that it really helped their cause. But every attempt to recreate a similar event has failed. Maybe what Woodstock really taught us was that you need loud music and lots of drugs in order to ignore the stupid shit around you and just get on with living. A lot of our generation has adopted a life style based around this and maybe they're not all wrong, but drugs and loud music can't solve everything. To many, drugs are the cause of most major problems. Maybe the problems caused by drugs are just extremes, and again, there are always extremes in any situation. But drugs seem do a whole lot that throws any sort of balance out the window. These extremes have created gateways for a lot of hate, whether it's founded or not. But because many drugs were so new and unstudied when the hippies started experimenting with them, people who hate the hippies have a lot of concrete evidence against them. More evidence than those of us who hate our hipsters.
...And good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding - ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague
Ever since the 60s, the idea has been going around that the hippies failed. Many think that their ideas were ill-founded or childish. Obviously anyone who seriously thought that anarchy was a legitimate option for society was misguided. But as the hippies grew up, settled down, and learned some discipline with experience, they didn't necessarily grow out of their ideals. If you look around you'll find hippie ideals in almost every form of media. How ironic that hippies were anti-establishment and anti-big-business and yet the establishments of corporate media have adopted "peace, love and happiness" as the ideal message to send to their audiences. The fact that our generation is practically being saturated by media, marketing, and mixed messages isn't really proving to be helpful to our growth and development. And this is why I feel that the combination of any or all of these problems explains why we have hipsters.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
I hate blogs.
noun
1. a Web site containing the writer's or group of writers' own experiences, observations, opinions, etc., and often having images and links to other Web sites.
I hate blogs because I don't want to sound like I'm self promotional. It's a horrible trait, and as intelligent, observant human beings, we seem to be able to pick it out really quickly. So why the hell am I writing a blog? Because I like writing about my opinion. And I have a lot of opinions. Everyone does. But unlike any of the modest, humble, stoic role models who are written into the fables of seemingly every human culture, I'm very open about my opinions. As much as it hurts to admit, I will never be a good role model. Expressing my opinion is part of my nature. Sharing ideas is how we build relationships and start movements!... ::record scratches:: but enough of that crap... I am here because writing my opinion down really helps me to organize my thoughts! I can really build on an idea when I can go back and review the way I worded something and can edit it and rework it. I feel like I've accomplished something when it's all saved to a tangible document, and sometimes when I go back to what I've written I can read about what a little prick I was ;)... It's always nice to be able to see and appreciate how much you've grown.
That being said, I have more to say (ya know... the phrase that I had written is pretty common in English compositions but sometimes the literal meanings of some common phraseology just make a sentence sound absurd!). ANYWAY... in this introductory posting, because I'm not completely shameless and feel a slight twinge of insecurity about what people might think, I have to say that you would probably have a very different idea of me if you ever met me in person. When you meet someone in person you get a much better idea of who they are. This is obvious, but it is also something that is really hard to remember when you're reading what someone has written. Those of us in the habit of text messages, emails, and online chatting get to learn this really quickly. Typing seems a lot more raw and unfiltered than speech. But the ease of editing means this is far from the case at all times. Typing is great for some things, but NOT getting to know someone. When you're talking to someone face to face you have a whole lot of information being thrown at you! The whole time you are actively as well as passively gathering info about the other person. There's information in the way the other person is carrying themselves, the way they look, what their expressions are, and how their voice/speech sounds. It's really quite interesting to me. If you like that kind of stuff too, I definitely recommend watching the BBC documentary "The Human Face". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280262/ John Cleese stars with other big names like Elizabeth Hurley and David Attenborough. Definitely some interesting and useful information in that show!
Anyway, enough self promotion and enough pushing my favorite movies on you. This blog ::cringes:: (again, I really don't care for that designation) is just gonna be my little place to talk about things that I'm thinking about. I hope someone is reading so that I'm not just crazy and talking to myself, but also I want to hear feedback. Maybe you're enjoying what you're reading, but it's more likely that I'm extremely long-winded and hard to follow. Please do NOT hesitate to voice your opinion! I'm not a major news network (hah, obviously) I'm a person and I love reading and responding to others' opinions!
So I really mean it when I say, Thanks for reading!
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