BigUglyWorld #11 - A Pervert on Every Desk (May 05, 2005)
Band:
The Rotten Dreams CD has been officially released, the band is enjoying a little rest and a little regrouping, and all is well.
Me:
Moving sucks so bad. I can't complain too badly, though. I've been literally glowing since getting this CD done and out into the wild world.
The World Outside:
The world outside continues on. The same wars, the same TV, and the same backstage shenanagins are flourishing as always.
Meat:
I live in this great neighborhood. It's older, it's perfect for families, close to shops, schools... all mod cons, as it were. And now that spring is springing again and the world is a little nicer to look out upon than the gray/white sheet of generic I've been stuck with lately, I've been spending more and more time staring out at the world outside.
It's a terrifying place, or so we're taught. My kids just underwent a lockdown drill at their school. I get calls from people warning me that they heard a sexual predator was on the loose. Even that most sanctified of good guys, Michael Jackson is in the news for interfering with underage dingles. Yup, it seems like there's a pervert under every bush.
No wonder my street is empty. When I was a kid, we'd have been out bike riding until all hours of the night getting into untold mischief. My buddy Jason used to come over to go bike riding and as soon as we were far enough away, he'd tell me that if we saw David (the bad ass bully from the Mormon family down the road) to haul ass. Invaryingly, this gigantic metalhead easily two years older than us would round the corner and the look on his eyes was pure homicide.
Come to think of it, that's where I got the scar on my thumb.
Today, though, it's not safe to be out on the street. It's dangerous. Like we said, there's creeps and monsters lurking all over my community waiting to grab any neighborhood kids with promises of candy and befoul them.
But that's all bullshit, isn't it? I mean, when we watch the news and they talk about this stuff, how often are we hearing about news that is in our own community? And how much worse is it out there than when I was a kid?
Charles Ng was caught in my home town. That guy and his buddy kidnapped a string of women, sexually tortured them on video, and then murdered them.
Harvey Andre (forgive the spelling) was a serial rapist in my home town. I was too young to know what rape was, but I knew it was something you did to women and I was really worried about my mom and sister.
A buddy of mine in college dropped out of high school after being caught by school bullies and tortured, including having his dick electrocuted.
Hell, the weird janitor at the community center once gave me a Coke and tickled me in a way that was definitely not what Jesus would have done.
Is the world more dangerous now? Well, the cops keep telling us that crime is down down down down. They keep talking about how the streets are safer than they've been in years. But somehow we're still scared shitless.
I have no scientific data to back this up, but I'm willing to bet that the percentage of sick assholes is the same now as it was then. We like to delude ourselves into having these glory days when the world was safer, but we're wrong. Do you really want to know what the difference between then and now is?
Back then, we heard about things that mattered to us on the news. When there was a serial rapist going around, we heard about it. When they were looking for a serial killer, we knew. But we didn't dwell on the details. We didn't turn a regular story into sensational pratter by getting as much of the brutality and cruelty of any act onto the six o'clock news. We were smarter than that.
But news is business, and the Americans have clearly shown us the way to be a successful news station. First off, you do nothing but feed off of the major news corporations, broadcasting their news and pretendng it's your own. Second, you do a lot of what are called Human Interest Stories, which basically means tearjerker stories to make people cry. People love a good cry. Finally, you tittliate them with gore and fear.
Don't get me wrong, it isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. Just check out the old headlines from the British papers when Jack the Ripper was ghouling about. The stories read more like Edgar Allan Poe than Time Magazine, and we're back again to the same idea that news has to be entertaining, so we appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Is the world scary? Sure. It always was. There are sick assholes out there just waiting to stick a finger down little Johnny's butt crack. There are parents out there dumb enough to send their kids over to the house of a millionaire grown-up who already bought his way out of previous charges of fondling little kids. There are rapists and killers and gangs and politicians and scoundrels and fiends and whatever else. Just like there always was.
I'm tucking one of my kids in last night, and she looks at me and tells me that she's scared the house is going to burn down. She told me that it could happen, so she was afraid. I asked her if she'd ever seen a house fire in person. No. Had she ever seen anyone in this house be unsafe with fire or electricty? No. In all of her experience, did she ever encounter anyone who had a house burn down on them? No. So her fear is irrational. The truth is that there is a chance that the house will burn down and kill us, but life is full of similar chances and we accept them.
You have a choice. You can be afraid or you can look at the facts in the world around you and figure out that it really isn't that scary a place. There will always be threats and there will always be dangers, but that is life. Get used to it.
View the BigUglyWorld Archive for more.