True love, soul mates, forever, real love, love of my life - these are all terms we hear often. We are read stories by our parents of a lonely character finding true love and unconditional acceptance with some other character; then we watch movies all about princes and damsels in distress and learn that the best thing that can happen in life is (if you're a girl) to be swept off your feet and (if you're a boy) sweep a girl off her feet) and have a magical life together as soul mates. Another popular lesson we learn is that there is such a thing as love at first sight, in which the magical amazingness of life and love sends a jolt through our bodies and tells us very clearly that we have just met our soul mate.We then proceed to spend most of our adolescence and adulthood looking for love and acceptance and things like that. Sometimes, for girls more than boys, we will spend some time pondering and building up our happily ever after fantasies even before puberty.
This whole train of thought stemmed from a movie I watched: Hotel Transylvania. So this movie started off funny and cute, no large quantities of skewed morals being shoved down our throats, just frivolous entertainment - but then towards the end, the movie took a sharp turn toward true-love-ville and started shoving this new term down my throat: Zinging - which is the "spark" you feel when you meet your one true love, and this zing only happens to a lucky few, and only once in their life. As I watched this big song and dance all about how zinging is the best thing that could possibly happen to a person and implying therefore that we should spend our lives looking for our "zing" - I realized that this is what kids are learning. I know that it's the same concept as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast and all those shows, the only difference being that I grew up with Cinderella and do not recognise the brainwashing intent (that and I haven't watched it in many years) - so this Hotel Transylvania is just an updated version of the older fairy tales some of us grew up with.
It is not pleasant dealing with the ways we are manipulated by the media and letting go of all those preconceptions and ideas, and now there is an entire new generation being force fed this poop about selfish love being the pinnacle of our existence on Earth: find someone who does not challenge who you allow yourself to be (sometimes called "unconditional acceptance") and who will validate you even when you're an asshole (sometimes called "love"). Oh! How could I have forgotten the fact that we are all incomplete without our soul mate to be our "better half"! Life is meaningless and dull without someone to complete my soul...
Yeah right.
How about this crazy idea: a bunch of rich people come up with the brilliant idea to keep the vast majority of middle class people so occupied with their own lives that they don't care about all the abuse and exploitation that happens in order for these rich people to stay rich and get even richer. "Let's get the people to live their lives by being obsessed with whatever we put on TV, give them some fantasies to aspire to and dream of."
"Oh, no, that's not possible! No one would do something so horrible! No one even has that kind of power!"
U-huh... sure.
Look around at the world we live in. Look closely at our industries and the horrors that are allowed in the name of profit. Consider the fact that the vast majority of people have no interests in promoting the rights of others - real activists are few and far between because it means giving up the delusions of the fantasy spoon fed to us from infancy. All of the measure we have been taking to apparently prevent abuse and save our planet are sorely overestimated in their chances of success. We need to act on a far grander scale if we hope to prevent this world from becoming a toxic, blood stained wasteland.
Comments
Post a Comment