Monday, September 27, 2004

Why watch it?

My co-worker asked me the other day if I saw the beheading. I shook my head no. He then proceeded to describe to me how the head was sawed off slowly and deliberately. Obviously, he saw it.

Then, he said sheepishly and with some guilt, "My brother-in-law sent it to me."

Has the world always been like this? Has it always known what the wrong thing to do was, and done it anyway? I keep thinking back to the Holocaust: how could such a thing occur with the implicit consent of the entire German nation? And then I look at today, and see each one of us implicitly condoning the beheadings.

What, you ask? How can I accuse each one of us of implicitly condoning the beheadings? Easy. By sheer numbers, we are giving approval. With each website hit, we are saying, Yes, show us more. After all, ratings is what rules the world, isn't it? Aren't elections just a form of ratings? Doesn't Amazon, C/Net and it's user reviews, and other various sites teach us that? From Neilsen down to elections, the world runs on approval. If it gets the web-hits, if it gets the eyes, if it gets the attention, it must be approval we're seeing.

I refuse to cave in to this. But then, I refused to cave-in to talking on cell-phone caller/drivers. I used to hang up on my friends who called while they were driving or made them pull over to talk with me. No more. Too many of my friends ONLY used their phones and ONLY when they were driving.

However, in this I will stand firm. And if you truly believed in democracy, you will join me. For I am choosing here to voice my opinion and my opinion is, the terrorists will not be rewarded in any way by me. I choose to take a higher road and with that, salvage my dignity.

(yes, I am still a resigned idealist. I know I will be joined by the few idealists out there, as well as the scores of apathetic people out there.)

Filed under Politics & B.S. and Reveries & Paranoias.

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