Freedom does not mean relinquishing moral standard... and then some random rant
So I've been annoyed for years by this Western ideology that freedom means the ability to do the immoral. The piles of Glamour Magazine articles about women being "liberated" from their burqaas, being able to wear miniskirts on the streets of Kabul or Baghdad, or whatever city is next. But I was on the BCC website today, which I'm usually very happy with, and I found this article. I read through it after being annoyed by the first piece:
The law of unintended consequences applies by the case load in Iraq.
I met a man in his home. He was using wireless internet.
They did not have that under Saddam.
As he clicked his mouse to open a document, he inadvertently returned to a website that he had just been visiting - hard core, full frontal, naked, young men.
They did not have access to that under Saddam.
It reminded me of a Baghdad cinema that I visited shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It had faded posters in the lobby of Top Gun with Tom Cruise.
I was compiling a report about entertainment in the new Iraq. I slipped into the auditorium to collect some sound effects for the radio report.
It was not Top Gun. The music was climaxing. So were the naked men and women on the screen.
"Did you show films like this when Saddam was in power?" I asked.
"No, never," he replied.
WHAT THE HELL? So, we all know that Saddam was a wank, but maybe he should've stayed in power if the alternative to him is bodies floating down the Tigris, severed heads in cardboard boxes, little kids getting hit by stray bullets, and a complete unraveling of morals (not saying that Saddam was the most moral of them, with his massacring and murals of sex scenes all over his palaces. However, maybe the fear that he instilled in people kept them close to God and their morality). It's sad and scary that so many people keep saying they would rather have had him stay in power, after all that he's done. But then again, the country is now in shambles. Where do we start to restore it? Infrastructure? Ceasefires? Kicking the Americans out? Revamping of morals by the implementation of a moderate Islamist regime? Je ne sais pas. It seems that most people are helpless in the hands of the conniving, schmuck minority.
Sometimes I wonder how I'm a person and these jackasses who act like animals are people too. Is that (hypothetical) guy who is shooting up heroin while directing a porn movie and trading in illegal arms equal to me? It's sad that legally, he is. Or the guy who's out in Iraq, brainwashed into thinking that he should "drink the blood of every man, woman, and child in Iraq" (Borat)? Even sadder, he probably has a better legal standing than I. Ugh. I don't mean to sound like a complete bitch here, but that can't be fair.
I get so depressed sometimes, because it seems to me that I live in a world in which the minority of people are good. Why is that? Everyone cares about themselves, and as Rousseau says, the first impulse of all humans is self-preservation, quickly followed by compassion. He also says that our societies have slowly ebbed away our compassion and forced us to ignore it in favor of self-preservation. Rousseau has a lot of crazy ideas, but this one I can get on board with. As depressing an outlook as it is, it sure as help makes sense. Take this picture that's in my PoliSci book, for instance (the chapter about the north-south gap): a very little black girl, balding from lack of nutrients, her legs and arms are so thin that they look like stalks of sugar cane spray-painted dark brown, her torso bloated from lack of protein in her diet. The girl is crawling along a dirt road, her head and face are on the ground. She is on her way to the local (and by local I mean no less than 14 mile away) feeding center, and she's being stalked by a vulture, who can smell death on her already.
The photographer of that photo won a Pultizer for it, but killed himself a year later, haunted by this picture. The girl lived past that day, but who knows how long afterwards. How do we stop something like this? This scenario could be happening to millions of people, and we're happy here in out little bubble of "when am I going to buy my next iPod, mine's getting old" or "let's eat a $40 steak". Our
Let's contrast that with the common executive or diva who won't eat something if it's not at the right temperature, or there aren't the right number of fat veins in the steak, or something else ridiculous. I think every one of us is guilty of one of these diva moments. I know I am. A time when the food in front of you is not what you feel like eating, or when you're not hungry anymore and you throw away your food.
I don't know how I digressed to this topic, but I have, and I guess my mind always end up at inequality in the end of the day. We can take the Rousseauan idea and say that all men are equal, or we can think like Mandeville and say that society is set up in castes for a reason, but either way, we can agree on the fact that something isn't right when there are people going through something like that in some part of the world.
Anyway... back to my material girl life.
The law of unintended consequences applies by the case load in Iraq.
I met a man in his home. He was using wireless internet.
They did not have that under Saddam.
As he clicked his mouse to open a document, he inadvertently returned to a website that he had just been visiting - hard core, full frontal, naked, young men.
They did not have access to that under Saddam.
It reminded me of a Baghdad cinema that I visited shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It had faded posters in the lobby of Top Gun with Tom Cruise.
I was compiling a report about entertainment in the new Iraq. I slipped into the auditorium to collect some sound effects for the radio report.
It was not Top Gun. The music was climaxing. So were the naked men and women on the screen.
"Did you show films like this when Saddam was in power?" I asked.
"No, never," he replied.
WHAT THE HELL? So, we all know that Saddam was a wank, but maybe he should've stayed in power if the alternative to him is bodies floating down the Tigris, severed heads in cardboard boxes, little kids getting hit by stray bullets, and a complete unraveling of morals (not saying that Saddam was the most moral of them, with his massacring and murals of sex scenes all over his palaces. However, maybe the fear that he instilled in people kept them close to God and their morality). It's sad and scary that so many people keep saying they would rather have had him stay in power, after all that he's done. But then again, the country is now in shambles. Where do we start to restore it? Infrastructure? Ceasefires? Kicking the Americans out? Revamping of morals by the implementation of a moderate Islamist regime? Je ne sais pas. It seems that most people are helpless in the hands of the conniving, schmuck minority.
Sometimes I wonder how I'm a person and these jackasses who act like animals are people too. Is that (hypothetical) guy who is shooting up heroin while directing a porn movie and trading in illegal arms equal to me? It's sad that legally, he is. Or the guy who's out in Iraq, brainwashed into thinking that he should "drink the blood of every man, woman, and child in Iraq" (Borat)? Even sadder, he probably has a better legal standing than I. Ugh. I don't mean to sound like a complete bitch here, but that can't be fair.
I get so depressed sometimes, because it seems to me that I live in a world in which the minority of people are good. Why is that? Everyone cares about themselves, and as Rousseau says, the first impulse of all humans is self-preservation, quickly followed by compassion. He also says that our societies have slowly ebbed away our compassion and forced us to ignore it in favor of self-preservation. Rousseau has a lot of crazy ideas, but this one I can get on board with. As depressing an outlook as it is, it sure as help makes sense. Take this picture that's in my PoliSci book, for instance (the chapter about the north-south gap): a very little black girl, balding from lack of nutrients, her legs and arms are so thin that they look like stalks of sugar cane spray-painted dark brown, her torso bloated from lack of protein in her diet. The girl is crawling along a dirt road, her head and face are on the ground. She is on her way to the local (and by local I mean no less than 14 mile away) feeding center, and she's being stalked by a vulture, who can smell death on her already.
The photographer of that photo won a Pultizer for it, but killed himself a year later, haunted by this picture. The girl lived past that day, but who knows how long afterwards. How do we stop something like this? This scenario could be happening to millions of people, and we're happy here in out little bubble of "when am I going to buy my next iPod, mine's getting old" or "let's eat a $40 steak". Our
Let's contrast that with the common executive or diva who won't eat something if it's not at the right temperature, or there aren't the right number of fat veins in the steak, or something else ridiculous. I think every one of us is guilty of one of these diva moments. I know I am. A time when the food in front of you is not what you feel like eating, or when you're not hungry anymore and you throw away your food.
I don't know how I digressed to this topic, but I have, and I guess my mind always end up at inequality in the end of the day. We can take the Rousseauan idea and say that all men are equal, or we can think like Mandeville and say that society is set up in castes for a reason, but either way, we can agree on the fact that something isn't right when there are people going through something like that in some part of the world.
Anyway... back to my material girl life.
posted by Ayah @ 3:29 PM
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