I go to the movies as often as I can.  I try and go during weekdays because you get to see movies for half of what is charged on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  I also try to eat before I go into the theatre but I'm not above smuggling a sandwich in, a bottled water or some vino.

I recently went to see Tron Legacy.  There was a comment in the dialogue about "contempt for the user".  The phrase seemed to be particularly appropos in today's sociopolitical climate.  As a society, as a nation we tend to take for granted things that were designed for our personal safety.  The most glaring example that comes to mind is the frequency by which people run red lights or fail to signal when turning.  Red light running causes 90,000 accidents a year.  One thousand lives are lost annually as a result of those so called accidents!  The collisions in intersections are not "accidents" per se but the result of gross negligence of drivers that ignore the light that has changed and charge through the intersection.  Running through stop signs is an even greater menace.  In a two year period - 1999, 2000 -nearly 14,000 people died as a result of drivers running through stop signs! 

It irks the fuck out of me to see people running red lights or doing the 'California roll' through stop signs.  They are typically holding onto a cell phone with the left hand which only obstructs the view of oncoming traffic.  One morning, on my way to work, some fool failed to yield at the intersection on the street where I lived and slammed into a car that contained a mother and her young daughter.  When I arrived on the scene, the fool was emerging from his car, which was too damaged to drive, and fled the scene on foot!  The Fire Department had to bring to Jaws of Life to the scene to extract the child from the back seat. 

Established social order is deteriorating.  The unemployed ex-con in Florida - angered by the firing of his wife - believed that it was okay to go into the board room of the school system and shoot at the board members.  The last bullet fired was a self inflicted wound to his head.  When that miscreant was loading his gun to go to the board meeting I cannot believe that he expected to show up with his gun, get his wife's job back and happily return home!  It looks as if he was playing out some twisted real life adaptation of a movie he identified with - V for Vendetta.  When the cameras stopped rolling, he had destroyed the life of the woman that he purported to defend and traumatized many innocent people!  V Wannabe left behind an unemployed widow who may now be subject to civil suits! 

When primitive man was running from saber toothed tigers, trying to return home with some food for his brood he didn't have time to sit around and figure out how to deliberately fuck up his life and the lives of others.  With the advent of leisure time people have become slovenly and unproductive.  I dare say some have become lethargic and suicidal, spending their days in front of the plug in drug with surround sound and high definition becoming increasingly desensitized to violence.  Television makes bustin a cap in someone look so easy! 

At the end of the day, I'm a tight ass who believes in law and order.  I was raised by social Nazis who held my brothers and I to strict codes of conduct at home and especially in public.  That rigorous social training stuck with me.  After I graduated from college and survived the petty agendas and bigotry of the white collar work environment, I understood that my upbringing was preparation for the cold cruel world.  My mother and father prepared me in a way that made me able to withstand the petty assaults of the world at large.  I came to value the need to lead an orderly existence because I was a silent observer of my parents testimony to established order because they had the discipline to get up each morning and go to work.  My mother came home each night from her job at Ford Motor and cooked a complete meal for the 5 of us.  My father painted the homes of Ford executives during evenings and weekends to ensure that we maintained a certain standard of living.

By 18, I understood the adversity that my parents had endured to keep my brothers and I safe and protected from the cold cruel world.  We were in effect living our American Dream.  Early in my education at the university, I came to understand that civilized societies came into existence because of the collective force of will and Draconian methods.  People were forced into an orderly existence through war, adversity and servitude.

Modern man has mastered his environment.  We have creature comforts that make for a pleasurable existence provided one has the wherewithal to afford them.  Unfortunately life without adversity works against the basic nature of man!  As generations have benefited from a certain way of life many have become contemptuous of the things that carried us forward and for each other.

Back To Basics                                    

In response to all of the chaos I've witness around me, I have become selectively more Neanderthal in my day to day approach to people.  My more brutish attitude is a response to holding open doors for women who walk by without acknowledging my presence in the doorway and ignant muthafuckas that step on my expensive shoes at clubs and try and walk by without acknowledging their faux pas!  I know that I'm giving in to the same convoluted social forces that have caused people to become more and more detached but I do help those less capable than I but I also get right in the face of men (and sometimes women) that seem to be increasingly confrontational in a passive aggressive way.  Younger men seem to think that women are impressed by video fueled machismo.  More of them need to heed the message in "The Quick And The Dead" instead of "Scarface"! 

It's difficult to be optimistic about the future in this modern age.  Contempt for established structure and social rules becomes greater each day.  The lunatics are trying to run the asylum!  People cheer on that Wiki (wacki) dude that leaked those government documents while failing to consider that we are at war and some of that leaked information may end up costing the lives of those that are defending our deteriorating way of life!  I doubt that his defenders have thought it out that far or care to.  They fail to realize that freedom and creature comforts come at a great cost!  They won't miss this way of life until it's gone!