Are you afraid of giving in to the insanity?

[UdoKier]

In another post I listed a few things that represent the "mainstream" of US "culture" for me.

"to be mainstream, you need to be up on your pop culture. You need to know what the gang on "Friends" (or whatever the in show is now) did last episode. You need to be able to keep up a conversation about last night's football game (which was pretty much like every other football game) or the Olsen Twins' eating disorders without getting BORED OUT OF YOUR SKULL. You have to nod in admiration as friends tell you EVERY banal technical detail about the new Plasma TV they got with surround sound or the new Navigator they got with the built in DVD system and individual audio zones (Great for keeping the kids entertained!) and how they are having the kitchen redone but they're just not sure whether to go with the Pergo flooring or go all out with the terra cotta.

And you've got to meet them at AppleOliveChiliGardenLobsterBee's and eat a "Bloomin' Onion" and listen to the fascinating tales of their experience on Atkins and how South Beach is just SO MUCH BETTER!"

Sometimes, I'm scared to think that eventually I'll give in and become just like them, move to the suburbs and let my kids have a TV and phone in their room, and we'll become a group of people just sharing a house like the rest of suburbia. I'll just give in and vote republican because it's just what we do here in the burbs! So many of the lefties of the 60s went this way. Does it just seep into your mind while you're not looking? Or is it just so comforting to embrace a mindset that ignores all empirical fact and tells you that everything you and your society are doing is JUST DANDY?


Are you scared that the brainwashing will somehow seep in and you'll become one of THEM?

[alittlelark]

1. I am a feral - brainwashing has no effect

I live in Silicon Valley suburbia (11 years now) and I have not been effected.

[PowerToThePeople]

2. Other

My fear is that I will be economically suppressed to the point that I will need to jump-on-board with their profiteering ideals or be on the streets starving...

[rucky]

5. are you a teacher, too? n/t

[PowerToThePeople]

6. Not a teacher

An underemployed engineer grad, who is very skeptical with getting a Corp job and becoming a re-puke out of social pressure...

[rucky]

9. yeah, an engineer friend of mine...

used to be a laid-back dope smoker, and is now a full fledged, straight-edged NEOCON, since he landed a six-figure job with a defense contractor.

Last conversations we had was about invading Iraq: "How else are we going to get our oil?" was his response.

guess I should say former friend.

[PowerToThePeople]

10. I can totally see how it can happen..

And it frightens me emensely....

[UdoKier]

11. Wow.

I don't smoke grass, but that's a helluva transformation. I know that a lot of folks who go thru the AA wringer end up as fundies...

[rucky]

3. Dude, I live in one of those housing developments

not as obnoxious as you may think, but I never thought it would come to this.

it's actually pretty cool (besides my uptight neighbors) - there's hiking trails and whatnot.

[UdoKier]

4. This is the only poll I've ever done...

Where I don't know how to vote.

I vacillate on this stuff.

I was a right-winger for a couple years in my early 20s. I outgrew it, but I look around and I see people who were once respected progressives - David Horowitz or Christopher Hitchens, and I see what they've become. I'm tired of being idealistic and broke and not being able to provide nice things for my kids like money for college or their own separate bedrooms. The question isn't whether I would sell out as they have if I had the chance, it's to what degree.

(sigh)

[yurbud]

7. The right wingers will go Hutu on our asses long before that

They are probably sharpening the machetes now, and passing out our addresses to clear channel DJs.

[Skittles]

8. I don't do any of that sh**; never have, never will

I am IMMUNE BABE. :D

[Kenneth ken]

12. other

I've been out of the mainstream my whole life. When I was in my late-teens and early-twenties, I tried to go more mainstream, it didn't work then, it wouldn't work now, it won't work in the future unless the mainstream moves to my realm of being. That wouldn't be giving in to the insanity, but rather them giving up the insanity. I'm not holding my breath.

[DustMolecule]

13. I like that.....thanks!

...it didn't work then, it wouldn't work now, it won't work in the future unless the mainstream moves to my realm of being.That wouldn't be giving in to the insanity, but rather them giving up the insanity.

Someone once said, "those who hold out for the 'best' very often get it." Your suggestion would definitely be 'the best'. :-)

[Kenneth ken]

14. welcome.

It kind of took me a long time to figure out both what mattered to me, and that even though those things don't fit in with the society I live in, that it was still the best way for me to live.

I don't make any effort to tell the people I know how they should live, or why my way is better. I just live it, and give answers when asked.

I'm content in my life, and being content in a society that is always chasing after something can of itself make people stop and think about whatever it is they're chasing after.

[Swamp Rat]

15. NEVER!

:D

[walldude]

17. LMAO... THEY LIVE!!!!!! Love the Fox News addition!

I watched that a few days ago and it's amazing how well the concept holds up today.

As for me... they can have my liberal views when they pry them from my cold dead cerebellum....

[Swamp Rat]

19. LOL! "... when they pry them from my cold dead cerebellum..."

Live free or die!... or become a pod person/slave for the alien lizards.

[lectrobyte]

24. Yeah. They Live rocks. And we are all out of bubble gum now.

[Lexingtonian]

16. buy yourself

a copy of Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through The American Status System. It's wonderfully cruel and satirical. You'll never see your neighbors and coworkers in the same light again.

After reading that you won't become one of Them (unless you're already hitched to One Of Them). He's half-right about his 'Xers', the bohemians and pseudobohemians of the late Seventies. (After all, bohemianism is, despite declarations otherwise, a protest-based variation on middle class life.) He is right about creativity being the redemption and escape from average 'productive' life and organized therapy-religion, wrong about the external aberrationism and implicit embrace of drug culture needed. For Xers, think The Talking Heads, David Byrne.

[AngelAsuka]

18. Creativity!

I haven't read the book you're talking about although it sounds interesting. I've always said my imagination and creativity are part of what keeps me sane. :dunce:

Good luck to them from an anime-loving manga-reading roleplay-gaming geekgrrl who can't stand 'reality tv' or their other puerile claptrap! :bounce:

~~AA~~

[Solly Mack]

20. I'm much too poor for that to happen

:)

[jdonaldball]

21. I am Napoleon! I am afraid of nothing!

[sweetheart]

22. take it as path

Just pick up the newspaper in the morning, look at the football scores
and you've got a week's material for dealing with morons.

Then look at all the reasons that fear arises, and go to those places,
directly opposte of the animal reaction to run away... stand and feel.
What is that fear? Is it the fear of being trapped, losing your
identity, being controlled and enslaved? If for a moment, we feel
that fear totally, of ourselves being trapped in a hateful SUV
culture of evil murderers... and we totally surrender, even the will
to oppose, and just passively enjoy the sunlight reflecting on the
colours, and the smells.

In meditation, one is not actively projecting or opposing. All things
are meditation if you let them be... and each thing that arises fear
and causes the animal reaction to run away from fear, is an attachment
of the mind, and life is showing you a bug in your software... for
free! From that place of meditation, there is unity, wholeness and
indifference. It is not a conception, but the fact of the moment that
running away suggests a future and the survival of the ego to run away
another day.... yet perhaps the survival of the ego is not all its
cracked up to be.?

Enlightenment is "through" the insanity, underneath it, and all
around it... it "is" the insanity, listening peacefully to the mad
raving. The question is not "who" is enlightened, him, her or they,
but "What about now?" Am i ready NOW, facing all those fears to
see what is real and substantial when the ghosts are dispelled.

To surrender is death, exploring that fear of death, that will come
one day no matter... so why not try it now? and see if there is
any substance to the fear?

namaste,
-s

[ElsewheresDaughter]

23. nope...this computer is the only new techie machine i have...still have a

omg .....a rotary dial landline and a huge library in my home (1,300 books)

have never owned

walkman
VCR player
DVD player
portable phone
cell phone
game cube
nor digital anything

and 1 TV and all of my children are John Hopkins Talented Youth Scholars and in the top 1% ...believe me, it's not genetic. they simply lived/& played in nature everyday, read tons of fairytales, enjoyed the arts and read alot more fairytales.

we are total non-conformists.

RESIST TECHNOLOGY!!!!!

[txaslftist]

25. No, because I read books...

Classics like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

If you make a habit of reading timeless classics (Twain especially right now) you will never succumb to the featherweight that is today's pop culture. They call it "pop" culture for a reason. It swells up, assumes a false importance, and it pops.

You will be left with the core culture that is American/western thought. This hyper-yuppie-militarism is a bubble of American thought, not a permanent thing.

[toddaa]

26. Reality is what you can get away with

Pop culture is amusing to play with, provided you can twist it for your own purposes. Like telling my children that Spongebob is a symbol for acid tabs. They tell their friends, and pretty soon you have all the colon blocked suburbanites panicking because Nick Toons is teaching their poor culturally repressed children that taking acid is fun.