Peace and Love
Given that I am generally an excessively negative individual, few things bother me as much as the idiotic platitudes and bromides that people choose to plaster about themselves as ways of defining their spineless and trite views on life.
Based on reading my blog it should be obvious that I am a person who takes words very seriously. I think that our ability to communicate our thoughts, beliefs, feelings is something that we should not only be thankful for, but also marvel at and should exercise to the greatest extent possible at all times. Our species, moreso than any other on this planet has the capability to make other beings understand who we are and what we are and what we want at any time. The only constriction on our ability to communicate with others is our own laziness, and the extend of that laziness never ceases to terrify and frustrate me.
When I read on your t shirt, or on your Facebook profile, or tattooed on your ankle that you’re into “peace” or you think that “all you need is love”, I have established that you are a moron in the blink of an eye. Life is too short to be disingenuous, or to subscribe yourself to such meaningless and empty phrases.
If you have all the words in the English language at your disposal, and the way that you choose to communicate yourself to the world is to copy and paste vaguely worded, mindlessly positive mandates about how thinking happy thoughts makes the world better then I don’t think you’ve earned the right to express yourself at all.
Most of my life I’ve been characterized as unhappy, overly serious, mean, and judgmental and while that assessment isn’t entirely inaccurate, I believe that anyone who pays close attention to the laziness and complacency of most people will end up unhappy and seem overly serious and judgmental. I certainly don’t think that I’m a walking cultural revolution, and most days I feel pretty shitty about the things I don’t do to make a change in the world rather than confident about the modest things I am doing so don’t take me for being arrogant. Honestly if I felt like my lifestyle was difficult I would have more sympathy for people who like to eat meat, drive cars, and get drunk every weekend. But I honestly feel so lazy most days, like I’m doing nothing, so the idea of someone who can’t put forth the effort to even be vegan would seem comedic if it weren’t for the billions of lives being lost.
This kind of diluted-hippie, lazy positivity is the result of the juggernaut that is American culture. When any subcultural group comes up with an interesting or innovative idea the entertainment industry, the government, and the media come together like the Power Rangers’ Megazord to process that idea, remove the threatening or subversive aspects and print the watered down slogan version onto shirts and bumper stickers. People who record songs like “Waiting on the World to Change” are the epitome of this apathetic complacence. That song encapsulates the mindset of American youth with a catchy melody. The world is a terrible place so I’ll just wait for it to change. Are you fucking kidding me?
Hip hop used to be the most threatening music in America, so much so that congressmen and senators and even the vice president were regularly attacking rappers in the public forum. “Cop Killer” by Ice T and Body Count is one of the most important songs ever written in my opinion because it terrified America so badly that record executives received death threats and boycotts. It was amazing. A record like “Fuck Tha Police” by NWA could never be made today. In 2010 hip hop is so friendly, so cuddly, that it’s hard for children of the Lil Wayne generation to even imagine that rich white people had ever been afraid of gangsta rap.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s not much fondness in my heart for hippies, but at least real hippies in the 60s and 70s were so passionate about their beliefs in peace and love that they marched by the thousands to protest war, they actually participated in political discourse, held rallies, wrote some of the most incendiary protest music ever recorded at the time, and some of those activists (Weather Underground members like Bernadine Dohrn) went so far as to commit non-violent acts of property destruction to protest the war in Vietnam and planted explosives in government buildings.
People who live this watered down post-hippie lifestyle could never imagine that living a truly peaceful lifestyle requires more than smoking weed, listening to reggae, creating a deeper dent in the couch as you get fatter, and suffering any personal humiliation necessary to avoid a confrontation of any sort. The unwashed, uneducated, unenthusiastic masses who populate the neighborhoods around any university campus have no concept of the difference between peaceful and sedentary so their underdeveloped brains equate a lifestyle void of movement, productivity, or disagreement with peace and egalitarianism.
Truthfully if you support the American government you do not believe in peace. If you eat animal products you do not believe in peace. If you think that love is going to solve all the world’s problems you’re a moron. It’s gonna take a lot more than love to get rid of the corrupt plutocracies that run the planet we live on. Love isn’t going to stop genocide, it’s not going to bring food to the starving, it’s certainly not going to eliminate religious superstition and usher in a golden age of secular humanism. According to 50 Cent, love won’t even get you on the bus.
People that preach the kind of happy-go-lucky, kumbaya-singing, ultra-positive mantras that you see pasted on every piece of tie-dyed clothing need to realize the amount of negativity, violence, and hate associated with their lifestyle and stop hiding behind vaguely worded, intangible doctrines and beliefs and actually DO something. Or if you’re not gonna do anything then the most peaceful and helpful thing you can do for anyone is to shut the fuck up.Peace and love, man.