To think clearly, I take a Riesen. ::pause for a Riesen:: Now I continue:
What do the Boston Red Sox, Bizarro World, and editorialists have in common?
Last night I was running and lifting a few weights in the late afternoon. I went to the gym in my dorm because I wasn’t doing anything extensive enough to justify a trip to McComas, plus it’d be packed there. Someone had left the t.v. on undeniably loud; I turned it down and left it on the current channel. It was Spike TV and some show called Bizarro World; the concept of the show is to spend thirty minutes of airtime filling your brain with strange images of different cultures and their quirky practices or mocking people with unusual body types or abilities. A low-grade Ripley’s, if you must.
This morning the CT had to two texts of interest. One was about how people are jumping onto the BoSox bandwagon as ‘die-hard’ fans only now after they’ve accomplished something once seen as impossible. The other was not a column, but rather a snippet located at the bottom of the opinion section stating that an editorial of a few days prior was, in fact, entirely plagiarized from a Washington Post article earlier in the month. And they apologized and stated that they would not allow such submissions in the future.
Beginning with last night’s exciting time on a treadmill, I briefly held a thought about our human inability to accept social identity. I truly believe there are more insecure people out there (let me focus on American culture here) than there are promising and apt, secure people. Much of the premise of reality t.v. is to make us feel ok about our own dysfunctional families and discouraging workplaces; we need a reinforcement to buttress our absense of hope and personal well-being. We need our expensive LCDs and plasma screens to show us pictures that make us feel normal, that permiss us to romp about in the green fields of peace.
This “BoSox bandwagon” is equally an example of such. Any bandwagon trend, whether it be sports teams, fashion trends, or accessory commodities, are cases of culture latching onto something in fear of losing a solid foundation. I regret to say that, in my opinion, to some extent the iPod has become one of those trends; yet a true, die-hard user base has been able to heed off the iPod’s degradation in part.
Finding acceptance is a natural course of our cyclic and iterative human behavoir. However, I propose that doing so continually and without thought to the all-important option of individuality is a vulgar lifestyle.
I hope I don’t sound like an elitist. I reprimand myself instantly when I catch a glimmer of such superficiality; it truly bothers me to find myself following a crowd for the sake of following a crowd. It takes a strong and honorable spirit to not mind being shunned as different if they desire to simply not follow social trends. Granted, that compliment assumes they aren’t of the sects of people who deviate from cultural behavoir to get attention; clearly, there is great insecurity in such people already.
Such are the things that flash in my mind when watching Bizarro World on a treadmill. Now I must study. A large physics test awaits me tomorrow; I heed it’s threatening howls by fleeing to Bollo’s for some study.
