Been thinking some about the whole Don Imus incident. I used to listen to him all the time up until about 3 or 4 years ago, when he started getting way too self-involved and tedious. I don't condone his comment for a microt, but I think in a way what happened was a good thing because it really brought home to a lot of people just how subtle and pervasive racism and sexism is in "our society". And I think there is a sort of double standard. And I also wholeheartedly agree that the idea of civility in social discourse has been completely obliterated. The question is, how to change that, when half the conversation you hear on the street or on the bus or wherever is fuckin' this and fuckin' that she's a fuckin' bitch and whatever else you hear. I'm all for using the right word at the right time, and sometimes fuckin' is the right word, but rarely. Not when there are so many other better ones around. And of course it's not just the words themselves but the hostility behind them. Why is everyone so fuckin' angry at each other all the time? Did we used to be? I don't remember that we were.
I think the loss of civility has gone hand in hand with the increasing stupidity. People seem to think and speak and act with less thought and less nuance and consideration. By that I mean that they don't consider things. They don't examine ideas or thoughts or issues. They blurt without thinking. Their worlds and their brains are getting smaller and cruder and coarser and less hospitable to sprouting complex thoughts. Present company excepted of course.
It makes me sad.
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4 comments:
Don't be sad. 'Cause when you're fuckin' sad then that makes me fuckin' sad. :(
I should probably say 'fuck' a little less. :-) I try to substitute 'frell' but in the heat of the moment don't always remember.
Sometimes it's the only fuckin' word to use. I tried using frell but it ended up just sounding dopey to me. But like I told my kids when they were at the age that they thought it was cute to say, using "fuck" was a very lazy thing to do, because they could virtually always come up with a better, more descriptive, more colorful, more extravagant word. So we turned it into a vocabulary-building game. They still say fuck, but at least they use it artfully.
I agree, my personal favorite in college was you could tell who was a freshman by how many times they said fuck in a conversation... apparently the first thing idiots do when they leave the authority of their parents is substitute 90% of there adjectives with fuck.
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