Tag: Society

Mediamorphasis

I need you to clear your thoughts. Remove all distractions, torments and dreams. Free your mind and abandon everything that you have ever learned or assumed to be true. For the next thousand words or so you are a clean slate. You have no beginning; nor end. You are an infinite entity uninhibited by prejudice and fear. It’s difficult isn’t? It’s hard to remove all the subjectivity and partisanship that we have allowed into our lives. But this little experiment will be worth the effort. Trust me. I’m a writer.

I want you to think about the evening news. Close your eyes if you have to. Imagine the reporters and journalists on your television screen. They are immaculately dressed in the finest of clothing as they sit at their desks or report live from the field. They look fantastic. Enviable even. One must feel so accomplished standing in a beautiful dress or designer labeled suit as they deliver the current affairs.

But looks can be deceiving. When you turn your attention away from their image and the branding presented to you; when you focus instead on what they are saying, are you still impressed with what you now hear? Death, destruction, and sacrifice reign supreme. A man has murdered his wife. Another has shot five people dead in a robbery attempt. Millions are starving. Wars are tearing the humanity from the clutches of nations. Another child has become radicalized. Every heinous report is accompanied by depictions of broken windows, police units and fractured lives splashed across the screen in a macabre slideshow.

Ruin and woe are threaded so effortlessly through each story that you have become desensitized. The damaged lives and senseless murders of others have been reduced to nothing but sound bites and footnotes that barely even pierce the veil of your subconscious. You have probably never noticed how repulsive the evening news is. Until now.

Every day the media tells us to trust no one and fear everything. Ruin and woe make the world go round. Or so we’re told. But are things really as horrible as we have been led to believe? Is the man whose religion differs from yours actually plotting your demise? Are governments truly lying to us about everything? Is every man, woman and corporation really your enemy?

…The short answer is no. The guy who lives next door and practices alternative beliefs doesn’t give a shit about you. He’s too busy trying to live his own life. The shear logistics required for a government to deceive its people make it nigh on impossible for them to cultivate devious conspiracies against us on a daily basis. And no one actively wants to hate you.

We’ve merely been misled and misinformed in the media’s quest to win our attention. Outlets like current affairs programs, tabloids, and circulars are businesses. As a business their primary objective is to accrue viewers. More viewers equal more money, and big business learned long ago that the human brain is attracted to two things: violence and obscenity.

The world seems to be becoming increasingly grim because the media started exposing the general public to violence, obscenity and disorder through events like the Vietnam War with the intent of providing a genuine insight into the perils of a conflict on foreign shores. But their pure intentions became distorted when marketing began capitalizing on society’s interest in the darker side of human nature. Nowadays media organizations are competing for viewers by continuously pushing one another to feature increasingly graphic and repulsive imagery, and we the viewer have become so bombarded with grotesque content that we have stopped seeing beauty in the world.

Before we go any further I feel like we need to take a quick break so that I can issue a disclaimer… I am a writer first and foremost. I’m not a scholar or leading expert in the media industry. My thoughts that are being presented here should by no means be taken as gospel. If you don’t like my opinions, or don’t agree with them, that’s fine by me.

Alright, let the controversy begin.

The media has undergone a metamorphosis. What was once a medium designed to communicate messages of interest and entertainment has now become a rabid beast hungry for consumer attention. While it is fair to say that we have become desensitized to violence, we have also created a world in which we form judgment and beliefs based off of targeted stories and biased opinion. We believe that the Muslim man who lives down the street is an extremist because we are told to mistrust. We believe that foreign parties are radicalizing children because we are exposing them to adult concepts long before they have the mental capacity to develop rational thoughts and understand their own emotional and chromosomal makeup. And we believe that it is our right to question everything, but we are being led to ask the wrong goddamn questions.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule. There are horrible people in the world. It’s inevitable that with a world population of over seven billion people that there are bound to be a few bad eggs. But the murderers, the rapists, the terrorists, extremists and extortionists are a minority. They are not the majority that you have been led to believe…

…So let’s start over…

…I want you to clear your mind again. I want you to empty your thoughts and bias just like you did at the start of this post and try to imagine that you are watching the nightly news again. Picture the anchors, the journalists and field reporters. They’re still dressed immaculately; they still smile at you with brilliant white teeth. But this time they’re telling tales of a different tune.

Instead of reporting that a man of Islamic decent has been arrested on terror related charges, they are instead talking of the Sheikh who has encouraged his community to aid the homeless. Instead of a story reporting that a man murdered his wife, there is one describing a man who loves his partner so dearly that he has professed his love with a hundred red roses. Instead of a child being accosted for attempting to carry a weapon onto a classroom, they are praising a school for their academic and sporting excellence.

Imagine how different our outlook on the world would be if the media presented stories designed to expand our minds and highlight the better angels of our nature rather than beating war drums and chanting tales of ruin and woe. If you knew of the wonderful deeds that they had completed, would you still be so quick to judge your fellow man? Would you still be so afraid of everyone and everything? And do you believe that we would be plagued with the same issues currently eroding the fabric of our society if we focused on positivity and progression rather than fear and violence?

I’m not saying that we need to be ignorant. We should never turn a blind eye to the one percent of mankind that choses to hate and destroy rather than love. There is no heaven without hell and without those heinous acts of brutality and violence we could never truly appreciate just how lucky we are to be alive. But we shouldn’t allow that same one percent to rule us through fear. The media has undergone a metamorphosis and led us to a horrible state of misinformation and hysteria. And if they can transform once, then surely they can do it again. So isn’t it about time they evolved into a medium of integrity and human decency once more?

Hellion

Hold up. Did you just try and walk up on me? You’re just a bottom feeder and you think that you have what it takes to front up to a wolf?

Alright; it’s your funeral. But let’s get one thing straight right from the start. I’ve taken down bigger motherfuckers than you before. I’ve buried bodies in the dirt and washed the blood from my hands without so much as a second thought. If you think that this is going to end well for you are sadly mistaken. I’m going to tear you apart.

You have to laugh at Internet trolls don’t you? You know the type: backwards pieces of shit who believe that they are clever because they sit behind a keyboard and demean or defame others. More often than not they are armed with a plethora of facts from reputable sources like Wikipedia or offer highly intellectual taunts like questioning someone’s sexual orientation or telling people to kill themselves…

I’ve had a few trolls in my time. From religious fanatics who believed that equality is the devils work, to scholars who thought that the ideas presented in my posts ran incongruously to what they understood to be true. At first the idea that someone could be so repulsed by my work that they felt the need to actively try and damage my reputation upset me. A lot. I’d sit for hours at my computer and read through the nonsense that people were writing about me and wonder how I could appease rather then offend. I didn’t want to be hated. I wanted to be loved!

But after a while you start to realize that the reason a lot of people turn to trolling is because of jealousy and fear. Through this site I have developed a sphere of influence that outreaches some and threatens to eclipse others. For those that envy what I have created they try to break it down, while those that I am threatening to out produce try to ridicule.

After you’ve been trolled a few times you start to enjoy it.

And why shouldn’t you? You’ve touched a nerve with someone to such a degree that they feel the need to try and belittle you on their own forums, unintentionally providing you with free publicity. I’ve been called out by conservative Christians, psychology scholars, other bloggers, business directors, and even a politician who resides half a world away; and every single time someone has tried to break me down their attempts have backfired.

You let the wolf lose inside your head you piece of shit. Now I’m going to eat you alive from the inside out. Can you feel me clawing at the back of your eyelids? Can you feel my fangs tearing apart your fragile mind? You started this. You stepped into the hunting ground and now you’ll be buried with the others. You wanted to front up to a world eater. Now I’m going to take yours away from you.

Let’s pump the breaks a little. This post isn’t about me sinking back into bad habits and trying to tear the head off of everyone who wrongs me… Well, not entirely… It’s about trying to ask at what point in history did it become acceptable to try and belittle and destroy someone’s hopes and dreams from the comfort of your lounge room? When did it become common practice to hide behind a URL, proxy-server or avatar and heap shit on others? It’s about asking where do we as a community draw the line against online bullying?

Because it has to be drawn somewhere. There has to be a moment in time where we as a society stand together and say no to trolling and the degradation of our fellow man and woman. There has to be an end to the faceless attacks against artists, writers and everyday people that leave them feeling broken and alone. Society has turned its back on humanity, decency and compassion in favor of bullying and faceless tormenting and it has to stop. It’s disgusting to see someone’s life or ambition shattered by their peers simply because we feel comfortable to harass from afar. If you don’t have the guts to step away from your keyboard and say something to someone’s face then you need to shut your mouth before someone breaks your fucking jaw.

Brutal? Probably. But as someone who has suffered through depression (and still lives with the knowledge that it will forever be apart of my chemistry) I know first hand the devastating effect that the words of a complete stranger can have. I understand better than most the hollow void that can consume your soul when you feel lost and abandoned. So if I have to get a little aggressive to rouse the masses from their blind acceptance of bullying then so be it.

There are far too many brilliant people out there who don’t have the belief in themselves or their abilities because they’ve been broken down and belittled by some piece of shit that hides behind a keyboard and thinks that it is funny to destroy lives.

For someone has arrogant as I am, the pathetic attacks from online bullies are worn as badges of honor. But the knowledge that there are other artists and ordinary people living in our society who feel threatened, lost and abused by faceless fucks makes me feel ill. Trolling and bullying has to stop and we as a community have to understand that belittling others destroys our humanity. Mankind is limited only by its imagination, so it seems counterintuitive to our progression as a species to be intentionally crippling the ambitions of one another through faceless subterfuge and online harassment.

If we abandon hate and focus on praising our fellow man and woman than there is no telling what we are capable of achieving. If you aren’t brazen enough to take your messages of hate to the streets, then it’s time to stop posting it online.

And if you really want to be a hero then try and walk up on a wolf again. I’ll happily rip out your throat, you ignorant piece of shit.

Free your mind

With forgiveness as our torch, and imagination our sword
We’ll untie the ropes of hate and slash open the minds of the bored
And we’ll start a world so equal and free
Every inch of this Earth is yours, all the land and all the sea
Imagine no restrictions, but the climate and the weather
Then we can explore space together forever
– Rou Reynolds

It’s pretty rare for the content of this blog to stray from my own self-indulgent musings or highly erratic commentary on the literary industry. In fact, I can only recall one post ever doing so. It was written some time ago and labelled Mona Lisa’s and Centrefolds; a piece that was essentially a middle finger to someone I knew and their derogatory view of women. I’m an arrogant piece of work and this page is testament to that. It has given me a soapbox to stand atop of and preach my stubbornness to anyone who will listen. But today I want to set aside my own ego and talk about something a little more serious. I want to talk about race…

…Believe me; I can hear the collective gasp of my readership at the mere mention of a controversial topic. I’m overtly opinionated at the best of time, so I understand and support any apprehension that you may feel. Regardless, I’m going to press ahead and make my argument. Because I have witnessed far too many racial incidents lately that I feel compelled to weigh in on the topic. Someone has too.

Any man or women who judges a person based on the colour of their skin, their heritage or their religious creed is a piece of shit. Plain and simple. If you are someone that feels comfortable to judge somebody based on their faith or their ethnicity then you are a sad, sorry individual that deserves no place on this earth. We live in a supposedly democratic society in which we demand free speech and the right to express ourselves as individuals, yet so many of us are perfectly fine to condemn or ridicule others for wanting the same basic human rights. It seems that we are a world of ignorant arseholes and bigots who care only about our own interests and have no real regard for the culture or beliefs of our peers.

We see racism occur every single day in our society, and oftentimes we do very little to stop and actually take note of its existence. From the bigot on a train cussing out a black security guard just trying to do his job, to the keyboard warrior who slanders the construction of a mosque on Australian soil, through to leaders of organisations such as ISIS, and even the fear-mongering media and politicians who want as to be afraid of anyone different to ourselves. It really has to stop. Something has got to give. It is 2014 for God’s sake, and although I’ve previously stated that I can’t see a future in which I have a family, if I did, I’d be so ashamed to bring them up in a world so ready to cuss out and vilify one another.

I know that people will oppose that statement. They’ll say things like: But I’m not a racist! Sure sometimes I distrust people who are culturally different, but that’s because most terrorists are… True. Most terrorist that attack your country are culturally different. But ask yourself this: how many soldiers from your country are currently serving within another’s boarders? And how many of that countries inhabitants would view those men and women as terrorists? Because I can confidently say that even though those men and women are acting with best intentions, those intentions are not always wanted.

Even just assuming that someone is more likely to be dangerous or pose a threat to your belief systems or safety is in itself a case of racism. I myself am happy to admit that at some stages in my life I have been incredibly insensitive and racist. Thankfully, in those lower moments I’ve had the good graces to keep my heinous thoughts to myself and my mouth firmly shut. I remember once catching a flight not long after a series of terrorist attacks overseas and finding myself standing at a boarding gate casting a suspicious eye over anyone who looked different to me. Jesus, that guy has a headdress on. He might be a suicide bomber! Or I don’t like the way that guy with the beard is pacing over there. He looks nervous. Like me might try and….

Yep. I’ve had those racist thoughts. And I’m betting most of my readers have at some point too. But unlike some, I’m prepared to admit when I have strayed into this mindset of vilification and stereotyping and can give myself a wrap across the knuckles for doing so.

Recently I’ve been witnessing a lot of negativity surrounding the rights of Islamic women and a slanderous campaign to ban the burqa. The campaign is hate mongering at its finest; accusing Islamic women of having something to hide from society, and demanding that they unveil themselves if they wish to exist within our supposedly free social system. The whole idea is ludicrous, and the fact that anyone could be so put out by something that has no immediate concern to them makes my mind boggle. I couldn’t give a shit about whether the woman next to me was wearing a bikini, a t-shirt, or a burqa. It’s no business of mine as to how anyone choses to dress. In fact, if I was going to cast judgement it would probably be directed at the girl getting around with her assets hanging out for the world to see. She ought to gain a little more self-respect and leave something to the imagination.

A few days ago I read an online post by some halfwit piece of shit who tried to compare the wearing of a burqa to wearing a balaclava in a public place. His claim was that if a woman of Islamic faith was able to wear a burqa within a public shopping centre then he should theoretically be able to wear a balaclava and conceal himself from the world. The post gained a lot of support from fellow ignorant losers, but failed to touch on a few important points…

Firstly, anyone who thinks that wearing a mask designed to conceal an identity is similar to an article of religious face is a fucking piece of shit. And anyone who supports such blatant racism and degradation of faith is just as worthless. Secondly, as a white middle class male living within Australia you are in effect, the son of immigrants. Your ancestors came here illegally and claimed this land as their own, showing disregard for the true indigenous owners of the land. So, if you want to get technical with your ‘go back to where you came from’ hate mongering, you better pack your bags and back the fuck on up; because by your own twisted logic you don’t belong here anymore than that Islamic woman trying to go about her business. And finally, imagine how you would feel if you were living in a world where your race was ridiculed, isolated, and disparaged because a minority of fanatics can be loosely associated with you.

Imagine waking up every fucking day and being forced to suffer through sideways glances, muffled snickers, and the judgement of uneducated arseholes. Imagine being judged because of something you believe in, or because of the colour of your skin…

…You know what? Fuck it. Let’s cast aside the politically correct bullshit. You want to know what the difference is between a burqa and a balaclava in your little public security rant you backwards fuck? A woman of faith will happily remove her burqa for security purposes in a private setting if need be; preferably in the presence of a woman, but if needed she will in front of a male too. You on the other hand, refused to remove your balaclava when requested multiple times. You’re not a hero. And you’re not a role model. You’re a sorry piece of shit who deserves his fucking teeth kicked down his throat for inciting hate and ignorance. The fact that you think you have a right to undermine a faith you clearly know nothing about only serves to highlight your own short sidedness. I hope to God that someone tracks you down and breaks your fucking jaw for your little stunt.

Breathe Chris. Breathe. Let’s get to the point of all this.

Here we go…

How much longer are we going to be influenced within our society by the ignorant, the miss-educated, and the bigots? How much longer are we going to allow the opinions of people of a certain colour or religious creed to be shaped and altered by those with a big mouth and undersized brain? How much longer are we going to continue trying to convince ourselves that we live in a fair and free society when there are people suffering persecution for their skin colour or faith every goddamn day?

Free your mind. Open your eyes to the negative bullshit and hate all around you and make your own decisions. You can’t judge an ethnic class or culture based on the actions of a few. We tell our kids that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but it seems that if that book is a Quran, or the Torah, or whatever the fuck else runs incongruous to our own beliefs, than we are happy to judge the shit out of it.

But we can’t keep living like this. It has to stop. We as a species have to come together and do away with the squabbling. Divided we are weak. But united we can save ourselves from our own narrow-mindedness and self-imposed racial oppression. Take a look at all of the death, destruction and sacrifice around the globe caused by cultural division. We are fighting wars that cost us millions of lives and tear apart the fabric of our society. We get hit with a stick, so we find a bigger one and hit back. And this game of racial tit-for-tat continues until we are trading sticks for arms and leaving battlefields awash with blood. We are supposedly the pinnacle of evolution on this earth, yet we are the only species engaged in war. We are the only species who kills out of hate and intolerance.

Love one another as I have loved you; treat others how you would like to be treated; an eye for an eye. We are all singing the same tune just in different tongues. It’s time that we learned a little of one another’s dialect and started making music together rather than competing for the same damn airwaves.

Free your mind. End the vilification. And if you still believe it’s your god given right to degrade and vilify, send me a message. I’m more than happy to beat some sense into your racist head.

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