Monday, February 10, 2003
"Friends don't let shortwaisted friends wear hip-huggers." ~ Quinn Morgendorffer on Lawndale High's Fashion Club's motto, MTV's Daria. Damn, I miss that show. Monday, February 03, 2003
i hate to be a cynical bastard, but i can't get past the fact that the columbia tragedy is little more than a glorified car accident. i don't want to belittle these deaths--because death is an awful thing--but people die everyday by much more inhumane and unnecessary means. the columbia explosion is sad, yes, but these astronauts are no more saints than the hungry children dying of malnutrition in africa everyday. and we sure as shit don't memorialize them, the thousands that die because instead of buying them bread and milk we use our billions to research why our flying tower of babel got too hot and caught fire on reentry. instead of creatively finding ways to get AZT and other retrovirus drugs across the atlantic, we perfect an unmanned plane capable of launching smart missiles from a few hundred feet at whoever it is we feel like assassinating. maybe--just maybe--we rally around “national tragedies” because we need to create a pain to counter balance the numbness of our mundane life necessary to keep from hating ourselves. or maybe we really are the navel-gazing, imperialistic gluttons that the world thinks we are, incapable of imaging a world beyond Must See TV and the Cosmo sex quiz, too callused to even give a damn. how did we get here? where are we going? where have we been? boy, this generation needs a hero. |