Post the Fourteenth: Where's The Love?

I miss arcades.
This seems like a strange statement to open a rant on, but it's true- the penetrating darkness of the room cut only by the glow off of dozens of CRT's, the cacophony of those dozens of game machines all playing their demos in discord with each other, the feel of a light-gun and the weight of the cable that tied it to the machine- and, especially, the flimsy feeling of the buttons on a fighting game cabinet, and the looseness of the beaten-up control stick. I played a lot of Tekken- my brother and I both did, and I considered him something of a rival- and getting to play it on an actual honest-to-God arcade cabinet was a special treat. Sure, we had it on Playstation- but the two experiences were nothing alike. The controller was different, the feel of the game was different, and if you played an arcade machine, there was a chance- even in the dying throes of the arcade age- that someone you didn't know could simply walk up to you while you were playing, and plunk two more tokens into the machine for the opportunity to pit their skills against yours. Sometimes they were better. Sometimes you were. Either way, neither competitor would talk trash to their opponent while the match was going on.
One, because that was poor sportsmanship and you just don't do that. Two, because the staff or mall security could 'encourage' them to leave if things escalated. But three- and I think this is most important: because this setup placed you in prime position to beat the hell out of your opponent if they dared say anything untoward about your mother, raised questions about your sexuality, or slung racial slurs in your direction. We treated each other with respect.
We don't get that anymore, in the age of online-only multiplayer. There's a reason I lament the loss of split-screen gaming; there's nothing quite like sitting on the same couch as your buddy, not only for the bonding experience but also for placing you in range for physical retribution if they pull some janky shit to cheat you out of an honorable win. Anybody from anywhere can scream anything into your ear and there's not a single thing you can do about it because they're miles (or even a complete hemisphere) away from you. Now, sciencey types have called this the "Online Disinhibition Effect", but if truth be told, I like the name that Penny Arcade coined for this kind of unchecked asshattery a whole lot better.

It's the GIFT that keeps on giving.

As charming as the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is, I'm not here to talk videogames. I hinted at it above, but the true purpose of this rant is to take you all to task for the lack of humanity that I'm seeing out of pretty much everyone these days. Quite sadly, GIFT does not apply just to poor sports on Xbox Live.
I try to stay out of politics, partly because I feel that there's enough screaming about that from both sides of the line, partly because both sides disgust me equally. Conservatives scream about commie libtard snowflakes who are too lazy to get jobs and are sucking the taxpayers dry by leeching off of welfare and letting illegal immigrants get away with everything, Obama was a terrorist and Hillary was a criminal, liberalism is a mental disorder and all democrats are completely shit-flinging insane, Trump is a superhero who is going to fix every last thing wrong with modern America- oh, and anybody who gets an abortion or declares themselves homosexual Is Going To Burn In Hell. Then they go to church and sing about how that Jesus guy really knew what he was doing by taking care of the poor and the helpless, and preaching tolerance for all, even those you don't agree with.
Liberals, on the other hand, are content to grumble quietly to each other about how America is now run by a Cheeto with a toupee, our president is the worst president in history and he's going to start World War 3 and blow the country all to hell, and anybody who isn't in support of impeaching the racist sexist president must be a white supremacist neo-nazi sociopath. They're backed up by the social justice crowd, which champions causes I can get behind at the surface level- they're leading the charge against racism and sexism, sticking up for gay rights and standing in defense of the trans community, pushing for a free internet and against rampant student debt. Where I take a step back and wonder what the hell they're thinking however, is in regards to how in their eyes everybody is equal and deserves respect... except if you happen to be a cisgender white heterosexual male. In which case: fuck you, check your privilege, you have no right to even open your mouth in defense of someone less fortunate, because you have no idea how good you've had it all your life. Go crawl back into your scum-hole and don't come out until either you have dyed your hair bright green, shaved half your head, and put on a single earring, or you're wearing a dress and ready to declare yourself a pretty pretty princess. And take that hula girl off your car dashboard, that's cultural misappropriation! Aren't you ashamed of yourself? You utter bastard.
(So much for equality.)
Now of course, all that said, this is the vocal minority of both sides. It's just alarming to me how many people make up said minority, and how vocal they are, and how giddy they seem to be at the idea of burning the other party at the stake for their sins (actual or imagined). Everybody on both sides of the equation has become a cartoon caricature in the other's eyes, even if they're on the same side of the equation: if you're slightly left of Right, you are straightjacket-and-padded-room crazy and should be kept away from voting booths, and if you are slightly right of Left, then you probably think Hitler running the country sounds pretty swell.
I've come to fear the word 'protests'. I'm not against them or anything- rather the opposite. I feel that peaceful protest is inherently a good thing. It's just.... whenever they come up in the news, it's because they've stopped being peaceful. Maybe rioting broke out. Maybe someone decided to shoot into the crowd and caused a panic. Maybe someone decided to drive a frickin' car into a group of protesters because they didn't agree with their ideology. News stories about protests never end well anymore, because instead of holding discourse to try and meet people in the middle and see from their point of view, we as a society have decided that the best and most proper action to an opposing viewpoint is to shut it down as noisily and dramatically as possible. We're so afraid of being challenged on our stances that we simply refuse to let it happen, whether violently or passively. People advertise on Twitter bios and Facebook profiles that they'll only follow/friend fellow Trump supporters, and anybody who doesn't show support by throwing a tantrum at the Left is instantly blocked- regardless of what they had to say or how nice they were about saying it. Meanwhile, the Left sits at their computers, pitchforks in hand, banging their torches against their computer desks, calling for Trump's impeachment (much like, I must remind them, the Right did for years after Obama was sworn in) and hunting down excuses to have the man thrown out of office (ditto).
Let's get away from political parties for a moment and return to GIFT. I posited to somebody recently that there's a line from Batman Returns that could also be applicable to the Internet at large: I am the light of this city, and I am its mean, twisted soul. The World Wide Web is an anarchic stew of free expression; with very few laws to regulate it, anybody from anywhere can say anything that they want with little chance of consequence. I can think of no greater example of the first amendment... and no more cringe-inducing, either. People flock to their Facebooks and Tumblrs and Twitters, heartily liking and reblogging the people they agree with. As for those they don't? They either block, scream at, or scream at and then block anyone they disagree with, gradually building themselves an echo chamber where they will never ever be challenged by anybody who doesn't share their opinions ever. Fuck discourse, the only way to really handle a sensitive topic is to set the person talking about it on fire, in a public forum. Amirite?
It feels like the echo chamber problem has been a problem for a lot longer than the internet, but boy oh boy did the internet make it worse. Now that the world runs on social media, shutting out any opinion that isn't your own can be done with the push of a button, thereby protecting you from all sorts of harmful scandalous opinions such as I agree with this celebrity's statement and you know, I think that popular movie is only okay. Don't get me wrong, I believe that there's a time and place for blocking off those around me- assholes who just want to piss off the world, people who use religion to justify their bigotry and prejudices, political zealots with a large mouth and a small memory, and scum-suckers who have squandered their chance to prove they're a decent human being. I do not, however, believe in using the means available to me to censor someone just because they have a difference of opinion.

Nobody wants to listen to anybody anymore, and it's really pissing me off. If your worldview is so fragile that being presented with an opposing viewpoint is enough to make you want to belittle and degrade the person you're speaking to, maybe it should be shattered. I've had it with you people, and how blindly you accept everything that's going on- as a society, we have normalized mass murder, tribalism, and hatred for our fellow man. These things are okay now, because That's Just The Way Things Are.
Am I the only one that terrifies? Because it's goddamned terrifying.
Tearing each other apart because They're With The Other Guys is not okay. That we have some maniac gunning down a crowd of innocent people every other day now is not okay. What the fuck is wrong with you, America? Put down your smartphones for twelve misbegotten seconds and really look at the world around you. Did we learn nothing from the Civil War? Abraham Lincoln, 1858, "A house divided against itself cannot stand"?
And here we are, a hundred and fifty nine years later, repeating that same mistake. Not with slaves, but with opinions. Not from inside bunkers and trenches, but from behind our keyboards where nobody knows who we are.
Wake up, guys.
We're better than this.
The Way Things Are doesn't have to be this way. Whatever happened to that bright, shining future we had as children? We were going to be astronauts and soar through space. We were going to be presidents and run the country. We were going to be paleontologists, and dig up dinosaurs. We were gonna be beautiful ballerinas, or mega-spies with lots of cool gadgets, or famous movie stars who lived in a huge mansion with a butler and everything. We weren't going to take any guff from jerks, and we never had to worry about a bad guy with a gun randomly popping in to kill fourteen of us at once. Why should we? Back then, that was unthinkable.
It should still be unthinkable now.
Maybe we never reached space. Maybe we never got that call back from Spielberg. Maybe we never got to perform Swan Lake on stage. And even if we did, we still got sidetracked, pushed down, walked on, and we wound up abandoning The Way Things Should Be and put it aside for The Way Things Are.
Maybe, just maybe, it only fell by the roadside. Maybe with some care and patience, The Way Things Should Be can still become The Way Things Are. That is, of course, if it's not too late.

Post the Thirteenth: 'Tis the Season for Complaining

A while back, I was considering turning Consoro’s Rants into a full-fledged book called The Tao of Not Giving A Sh*t, with some equally cheeky subtitle like Meditations of a Slacker or the like. There, I would have enshrined my entire philosophy on life, taking society to task for all of its ass-headedness in between anecdotes about my cat and my misadventures in janitorial and how magical girls help me stave off crippling depression.

Ironically, while I was failing to give a shit and being a total and complete slacker, someone else wrote my book better than I could.

Well done Mark you clever jerk

However, there are a couple rants I wrote for the book that never went live here on the site because… well, they were going to be in the book. So, mildly updated, and submitted for your approval, here's my take on the holidays.
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Overcommercialism is kind of disgusting. Understatement of the year, sure, okay. But I've always had an issue with it. I realize some level of capitalism is required for the gears of society to turn, but at this point every company involved has spent so long trying to one-up each other that they've taken to cartoonish extremes to try and get you to spend your money. I always know when Halloween is coming up because sometime around October, everybody starts playing Christmas music and decking out their stores in red and green.

Don’t you laugh and shake your head. You know I’m right.

We've lost what our holidays are about, among all the money-grubbing. Valentine's Day is a pretty egregious example, so let's start there: According to ring peddlers, you are an unfeeling bastard if you don't empty out your bank account to buy your girlfriend a shiny rock. "This Valentine's, show her you care. Give her the gift of Generic Jewelers."

Oh. And you have to shower her with expensive chocolates and fresh roses, too. And take her out to a fancy French restaurant where the prices aren't listed on the menu because if they were your wallet would have a seizure. Nothing says “I love you” like crippling debt, amirite?

Now, I'm very much single, but if I weren't I would find a cheaper (but no less meaningful) way to flex my romantic muscles. Take her out to a chick flick. Go for a sunset stroll on the boardwalk. Have dinner at a nice place- just fancy enough to have class, but without breaking the bank. Roses are all well and good, but they inevitably wilt. Chocolates can be shared, which gives them a bit more merit. Memories, though, are best- they last forever.

Next up is Easter, which started as a Pagan fertility festival and then got hijacked by Christianity as the official celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Can someone please, please point out to me where in the Bible Jesus rose from the grave and then went to hunt down pastel-colored eggs and eat chocolate bunnies with his disciples?

Didn't happen.

There's a bit of a drought of holidays there for the next couple of months, with the exception of the Fourth of July- which is spent blowing things up in remembrance of that time we declared we were gonna blow things up. Still, boomies aren't very safe to sell in a supermarket, and so the worst retailers can do is badger us to buy beer and meat for our July 4th barbeque, after which we'll proceed to watch things explode like a Michael Bay film where he gave up trying to justify the special effects around the 'plot'. But then we swing back into things with Halloween, sometime around August (at least, according to retailers).

Seems the costume shops expect any girls over the age of 10 to dress up as a slutty nurse, slutty vampire, slutty witch, slutty maid, or a slutty nursevampirewitchmaid. Guys don't get much better costume choices- their choices are Dr. Lovebush (OBGYN), a keg of beer (complete with tap), or a giant condom (no comment). Sure, there are more serious 'scary' costumes, but coordinating them from what you can find at Spirit Halloween or the costume aisle at Wal-Mart- and still having them look good- is a bloody nightmare (lettuce, tomato, hold the pun). Then there's the mass of Halloween decorations that shops put out every year, many of which I suspect are recycled because not enough people bought them the year prior. Paper skeletons, plastic pumpkins, witch decals for the glass on the door and styrofoam tombstones for the front porch, none of which are truly spooky enough to strike that chord of tension that makes the night so vibrant. And heaven forbid we forget the gratuitous amounts of candy- after all, little ones will be coming around, and you're not about to disappoint them by having nothing, are you? Worse yet, the older crowd might follow up on the promise of "trick".

Thanksgiving is the only holiday I can think of where tradition hasn't been entirely cheapened by money- it started with a feast to bring people (pilgrims and native Americans) together in gratitude, and is still, somehow, a feast to bring people (your family and those in-laws you can't stand) together. The gratitude part is more or less still there, depending on family traditions. We always went, one at a time, each naming off something we were grateful for. Thanksgiving I have no problem with.

It's what comes next that's the issue: Black Friday. The retailer's holiday.

If there is a more disgusting display of hypercommercialism, please refrain from showing it to me. People have been trampled, beaten, and killed in what can only be described as a riot that breaks out in every Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Toys-R-Us in the nation once every November 26th. When the doors open, that's it- all civility goes straight out the window and damn near everybody becomes a shark in a feeding frenzy. All-day sales, but you can only be in one place at a time! And every second you spend in one place, someone is ogling a display full of Christmas Present X at another- a present you have to race over and grab before they're all gone.

Black Friday shopping is a hell of an experience, objectively speaking. I went one year, not because there were any sales I wanted to jump on, but because my curiosity had gotten the better of me and I wanted to see the chaos for myself. So I tagged along with my brother and stood in line at 3 in the morning outside a Best Buy, waiting for the doors to open, observing the people around me while I shivered against the wall (I couldn't move from the spot to warm up, lest I lose my place in line). Some genius had the bright idea to capitalize on the wait, and had driven up with a portable water heater, packets of cocoa, and disposable styrofoam cups, and they were selling hot drinks to the people in line. When it was finally time to go inside, the path the Best Buy workers had laid out was one-way-only for two reasons- first, it was narrow so that it could wind around the entire store in a serpentine fashion and prevent people from mobbing any displays (more than they already would), and second, I couldn't have moved backwards if I wanted to, with so many people trying to pick up everything on their Christmas Shopping List! We eventually found relief in the home appliance department, where we ducked out of the chaos. I leaned against a dryer and watched the throngs of people, and came to the disturbing conclusion that, even at the poor blue-shirts' attempts to organize the chaos with a clear and winding path, Black Friday sales still reminded me of a horde of pissed-off ants attacking the bratty kid who knocked over the hill. And, arguably, both are thinking the same thing (albeit for very different reasons):

"YOUR ASS IS MINE."

That was about 9 years ago. NOWADAYS, retailers aren't even waiting for the clock to strike 12. Workers are required to cut time with their families short so that they can set up for Black Thursday sales, which is essentially a giant middle finger to anybody working at those particular businesses. I haven't shopped Black Friday since, but I can only imagine that the same insane swarm mentality I saw that day now extends to the last few hours of Thanksgiving Day. The only difference is, employees are forced to put up with shittier greed-blinded human beings even longer than they had to previously.

Which, naturally, leads to the last stop on our tour of the end-of-year holiday season: Christmas. What used to be the pagan festival of Yule was, again, absorbed by Christianity and made into the celebration of Jesus' birth. That's all fine and well- but we don't even celebrate that right! While I'm cool with the idea that Christmas should be spent with friends and family, exchanging gifts in remembrance of that night in Bethlehem, retailers have propagated the idea that you NEED to find the right present for those closest to you, even if it puts you in months of debt.

I appreciate How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Both versions, actually- it's impossible to beat Boris Karloff reading a children's book aloud, especially when that book is one of Dr. Seuss' most treasured classics. However, while I cringe at the live-action version and how much it deviated from the original (and a couple of really bad jokes that I know had to be in the script, as Mr. Carrey is usually funnier), it does a very good job of pointing out what Christmas has turned into, and asking in a voice I could only dream of replicating here on my soapbox:

"REALLY, PEOPLE?"

This, I think, is actually its selling point. It conveys well the hectic pre-Christmas season, the stressed-out 'must get everything before it's too late' mindset, and drops into the middle of it all a little girl who looks around and asks, "But... why?" She redeems the irredeemable Grinch, charms our hearts with her child's sense of curiosity and idealism, and at the end of the movie, when the entire town is pissed at the two of them for tearing apart everything they know, she helps them realize that all the fancy shiny distractions that have become part of the holiday are just that- distractions. We aren't celebrating togetherness with friends or family anymore, we’re celebrating an excuse to blow a whole lot of money we may or may not have in a feeble attempt to buy somebody else’s love.

But... why?

I don't care about where the origins of our holidays lie, but rather that some money-grubbing assholes have dictated how we have to spend them. It doesn't have to be about the money- it shouldn't, anyway.

I like passing out chocolate to little Darth Vaders and Princess Elsas and Ninja Turtles, just as I liked getting chocolate from strangers when I was their age. It's about getting to be something more exciting for the evening, even if you're merely wearing a sheet over your head, and that tiny thrill of danger that comes with walking block after block through unknown neighborhoods, expanding the boundaries of your world, and- even if you're too old to go trick-or-treating- you can still celebrate fear by taking a walk through a graveyard in the dead of night looking for ghosts, or popping in a monster movie, the kind that makes you tense without having to resort to spreading gore everywhere. Those are the best kind.

I like sitting around the table, reflecting on those things I usually take for granted, and gorging myself on tryptophan-laced bird flesh, dinner rolls, pumpkin pie with whipped cream. It's about sitting down and spending time among other people, extended family, maybe friends, and sharing a hell of a lot of food. It's about breaking out of the digital hermitage we've inflicted upon ourselves, where we've put more and more distance between ourselves even if we're sitting in the same room. It's about having something to be thankful for- from a Hollywood idol toasting their success, to the homeless cherishing that there's a roof over their heads at all, if only for the night.

I like being sneaky and getting my family things they wanted but didn't know they'd be getting, things they might have mentioned offhand but hadn't seriously considered. I like sitting in front of the fireplace, sipping hot cocoa and watching movies with everyone until Mom passes out in front of the TV. I like diving under the tree to get at the presents closest to the wall, slowly un-taping and neatly unfolding the wrapping paper from around a mystery gift as my brother- half amused, half exasperated- tells me to just tear it off, it's all getting thrown away anyway so there's no point in being tidy about it. It's about spending time with the ones you love, being generous, being humble, being grateful even if you didn't get what you wanted off of your list, letting your mother, your cousin, your lover, know that you care about them, and want to see them happy. It's about peace on Earth and goodwill to men- if only for a single day, the world stops and all of the asshattery, the cruelty, simply goes away for a few hours.

It doesn't have to be about the money.