Friday, January 20, 2006

M: so much outrage, so little time

I think maybe that's why I haven't been posting much lately. I'm constantly outraged, but I get so angry and caught up in things that I don't have a chance to organize my thoughts to put it all down here.

Here's one: a
McCarthy-like witch hunt for "radical" professors at UCLA. UCLA! Come on people! Apparently there is a new alumni group that is paying students to rat out profs who are "abusive, one-sided or off-topic" regarding politics in their classes. They buy recordings of lectures so they can have "proof" that the teachers aren't being professional and can confront them about it. This is absurd. They have even named 30 teachers ("the dirty 30") who they think are too identified with left-wing and liberal causes.

And another: the Red Cross suggests that it's hopeless to try and save the world, so you should give up and just give blood instead. (The ads are
here, the Slate article where I read about them is here.) Now I'm all for giving blood - it's necessary and I think anyone who does it totally rocks. But their ads suggest that it's just too hard to try to stop unfair labor practices and pollution, so we shouldn't even try. That our young minds are just too simple to completely understand all the impacts of our actions, so we should leave things be. That if we want to do something, then we should give blood and forget about all the other problems in the world. Because we've saved a life by giving blood. And that makes it all better.

This just re-emphasizes the thought that "there's nothing one person can do." Enough! I'm sick and tired of just sitting around and talking about things! Why haven't we done anything? Wanna know why? Because we're fucking pathetic. We're fucking lazy. We want someone else to start the movement, to do the hard work, to organize and motivate and take that first step. We're too goddamn politically correct trying not to offend people that we miss the point.

So the question is then, where the fuck do we start? I'm absolutely overwhelmed with the amount of bullshit going on that I don't know which cause to support (or protest, for that matter). Where do I go from here?

And one last thing (and to end on a lighter note): when did "tracking monkeys with lasers" become nerdy? That is so freakin' cool! I would love to track monkeys with lasers! Where do you get that job?

2 comments:

susan said...

I've so been thinking about this... I thought Dean was the answer to more-or-less everything, but now he's all fundraising and no message, so there that went. And I write a lot of letters to political people -- I don't know if it helps, but I do get replies, so at least they get tallied. When I was in middle and high school, there was this "Make a Difference" campaign, which wove its way into lots of history lessons, about how far things can go before anyone speaks up. You look at someone like Cindy Sheehan, and though she got a lot of flak and not much credit for it, she was one person who completely changed the tone and content of the dialog in the media, and made a HUGE difference. I'm not sure I'd want to stick my neck out that far (or sleep in a tent all summer), but I want to be the sort of person who speaks up on (any, all) issues that matter to me.

Anonymous said...

Why do you hate America so much?