Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Societal Benchmark-An Editorial

I am concerned!

The (not-so) recent onslaught of the figures in our direct limelight are not the same caliber people that my father had me looking up to. More overly, these people are being allowed to serve as a benchmark for where we are as a society, and the level of intelligence has plummeted.

There is a tongue and cheek movie called Idocracy, where in the future we are led to believe that we (Americans) teeter on the brink of extinction based on our diminished, if not deleted, sense of intelligence. A movie mind you that should be turned on to induce chuckle, kill two hours on a Saturday, and move on with little to no further thought. But what if we see ourselves taking giant leaps towards making this movie prophetic. Where will we be when one day we begin to water our crops with energy drinks and wonder why we are hungry.

We already know that technology has afforded us spending valuable time on anything worth while. Our attention spans are shrinking faster than Al Rokers belt size, but have we ever stopped to wonder at what cost?

The final nail in this proverbial coffin for me is the sporting headlines of Richie Incognito the bully. I understand and recognize that there is a particular brand of behavior behind closed doors in professional sports locker rooms, and it should be that way. At that level of performance, teams are families, and I for one love my brother more than most people because we have rolled around in the dirt trying to kill each other.
 But this Incognito took hazing to a whole other level, and then we, as a public, became aware of it. A Molotov cocktail.
Our attention spans have most of us reading taglines and never the content, so all we learn is the "Duh" of any given situation, and its shovel fed to us by the millions of reporters neglecting
advances in modern medicine and space exploration to break twitter scandals wide open.

We have Mayors smoking crack and then talking about it to the media with his loosened NFL throwback tie dangling from his dainty 300lb frame, we have NFL stars crashing into trees at 9am wasted with weed in the car, we have.....forget it, you understand.

How am I supposed to take any of the examples we have today in the public eye and assure my child that he can be just like him if he tries hard enough? Am I supposed to concentrate only on the fact that Brawando has electrolytes?

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