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12:30 p.m. - September 20, 2002
On nothing at all
While crossing the bridge this morning there was plenty of opportunity to read bumper stickers because traffic wasn't traffic; it was a smelly parking lot made worse by the sun warming up the salt ponds. Ahead of me in what must be a trendy car because I see them all over was a series of stickers, ranging from Big Without Viagra and My Shoe Size Says All to My Other Ride Is Your Girlfriend. I found myself bothered by what I would consider an example of the decline in civility and gentility. Maybe such I-don't-give-a-fuck-what-you-think traits are the logical conclusion to deconstruction and moral relativism, but I for one do not want to be inured to the omnipresent crass and ignoble.

I don't understand hyperindividualism but I can see its effects. Everybody can, and I'm sure many people think about it; but nobody does anything to counteract the tide. Maybe I have my head in the sand and should join in the fun, but I just don't get it. What's wrong with being polite, modest, and concerned for the neighbors? I dread the day when I'm driving my Windstar full of Little Jasons and Jasonas and voices pipe up, Daddy, What Does It Mean, My Other Ride Is Your Girlfriend?

Recently Monitor applauded blunt references (a visual?) to a wet dream on some new show and it is that kind of thing that I don't understand. What is the point of putting something like that on TV? To counteract parents who don't talk to their kids about biology, or to supplant such dialogue in the first place? It's in-your-face, shock value, Howard Stern for President and we say this is good? It's good that the media and establishment have won the struggle against narrow-mindedness and exclusionary, religio-socio-moral oppression so that kindergarteners are schooled in body parts and sex ed shoved down the throats of high schoolers who don't have a need for it because they're already mommies and daddies? The sloughing off of values in favor of nothing naturally leads to the intellectual conundrum that is the current mess: If there is no right and no wrong but simply interpretation, then you have no grounds upon which to judge me, so look the other way and attend to yourself while I do my own thing, no matter what. Is that what we want?

It's a slippery slope, folks. The right to euthanasia. The right to abortion. The right to suicide. The right to have my values trump your values that oppress mine. The right to medicinal marijuana that somehow ends up in the hands of the kids down the street. The right to free speech as long as it doesn't infringe on people's feelings. The right to exist sans expectation of anything at all.

This supposed melting pot/vibrant quilt of many patches/other metaphor is being washed gray.

In other news, the street in front of my home is being repaved.

 

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