The Norm, Big Dicks and Spoilt Lives

The Dalai Lama, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph says, among other things, that Westerners have

...become self-absorbed, burdened with too much choice.

"It is fascinating. In the West, you have bigger homes, yet smaller families; you have endless conveniences - yet you never seem to have any time. You can travel anywhere in the world, yet you don't bother to cross the road to meet your neighbours," he said.

"I don't think people have become more selfish, but their lives have become easier and that has spoilt them. They have less resilience, they expect more, they constantly compare themselves to others and they have too much choice - which brings no real freedom."

Not more selfish, but spoilt. What does that mean? I always figured being spoiled meant being given ones' way for too long, leading to selfishness. Perhaps the Dalai Lama means to, "injure the character of by excessive indulgence" (The Oxford Modern English Dictionary), which is probably true. Our character is definitely in question. Case in point: Is there one person in our government that you trust? Everyone has sold out, everyone is spun, every news release is layered with lies, half-truths, hidden agendas. All is compromised. Lies are now the "norm".

The sad thing is that most "normal" people ("normal" in the Reverend Mykeru sense: "By definition, a "normal" is the sort of person who would actually use phrases like "think out of the box" or "color outside the lines" in the service of doing something trite, boring, probably life-hating and usually involves ripping people off, and then bitch slap the first person actually caught thinking outside their box and coloring outside their lines.") are totally unaware of their inability to think critically, self-examine or analyze how their demands for conformity effect the rest of the world.

We are blind, all wrapped up in our spoilt lives, bringing up our spoilt children, handing down our fixation on body image and designer clothing and our selfish dreams of ownership and exclusion in our spoilt and polluted world. We are deluded, who drive super-sized gas-guzzling Hummers (of all things) because a fucking Hummer symbolizes a super-sized he-man penis. Driving a hummer is a parade of insecurity about dick size. "So while our brothers and sisters are off in the Middle East risking their lives to secure America's fossil fuel future, H2 drivers are pissing away our "spoils of victory" during each trip to the grocery store." (Fuck You and Your H2) Real men don't need a big environment-destroying machine to validate their masculinity. Size really isn't that big a deal.

Anything of value has gone underground (Please let there be things of value underground!). Above are the "normal", who demand those things for which they later punish you, start wars and rumors of wars, require allegiance, classify documents for your own good, rape and pillage while wearing the garish patriarchal costumes of patriotism and christianity. Inciting fear of difference. Creating disturbances. Censoring. Neutering. Hating. Killing.

Yes, we Westerners are spoilt, a condition of which only we are unaware. The rest of the world knows that we fancy ourselves the "norm", the nice guys, the charmers, the center of the universe. The sun. The moon. The constellations. The big dicks.

Those of us who still live up here? We are merely the complicit. We are goin down, I think. Perhaps that is the only road to freedom.