By Royce Geist
Last night while having a conversation with one of my older brother’s friends(white male, late 20’s, lives in a small apartment, and has moved from relationship to relationship) the topic of feminism came up and I started to talk about how its crumbling nations from the core due to the reason the main bread winners and producers of structure in those said nations have no value to fight for anymore. He called me alarmist and said that his life really wasn’t that bad so I should just relax.
He’s happy looking forward to getting one of the new smartphones soon. We talked about how all the laws are slanted against men and the fact that you can have all of your earnings and children stripped away for any reason whatsoever and be chained in a type of financial slavery. His response? Have you ever heard of a guy sitting down thinking “hey I don’t know if I should get married and have kids when one day this broad might take all my stuff and children away.” I laughed and said I do still think about it.
It’s funny how different people’s opinions can be; some are satisfied with PC games and smart phones, others actually want to create a family and have their genes live on especially since they’ve had to work this hard to stay alive for this long.
There was a recent article that I read containing a study that shows (like there was really the need for a study for it) how younger people would rather choose virtual lives or just being on the pc compared to real life because ‘they can click close as soon as something becomes un-fun.” That isn’t just a problem for the new generations — just look at how many adults play World of Warcraft and in turn completely neglect their real world duties when the need to ‘raid’ arises.
Towards the end of the conversation after talking about other social issues my friend decided that I was being alarmist once again and that life really wasn’t that bad, I kept thinking about how I bet that phrase would change had any of the plagues that have hurt other people happened to him, such as a false rape accusation, no fault divorce, loss of children, etc.
I think what’s alarming is that most people, just because they haven’t had it personally happen to them or even a friend of a friend, see no need to look into these matters for more than a moment. It’s almost like the old saying ‘If you don’t say something when they start coming for your neighbors who will say anything when they come for you?’
They go on with their daily lives satisfied with virtual lives, smart phone advancements and heavy drinking, none of which are any value to me. I want the white picket fence, the small family, the loving wife that I don’t feel like I need to look to a ‘gaming’ manual every 5 seconds to keep around. I may be out of my league here being young but really as much as I try to stay in the now, thoughts of the future are always consuming me. There are so many very exciting things on the horizon but so many terrifying realities that are seemingly swept under the rug with most people that it drives me nuts.
I just hope that soon with the more widespread access to information out there on the internet, people start deciding it’s time to face these problems and realize that we are in fact in a war zone. Life is not easy, it is an uphill battle and most people as far as I can see would just be happier to lay at the bottom of the hill in the story of Sisyphus, allowing the boulder to lay atop them, so long as they can play tower defense games on their smartphone, rather than struggle to the top. However, as we are humans and not myth, I see no reason why one day we wouldn’t be able to place the boulder on top the hill holding it stable.
The only question is, in the microwave generation do any of us have the patience to achieve such a daunting task?
