Ah, a brave new world indeed.

6 year olds playing with toy prostitutes, wanting to be sexier, starving themselves and shopping for bras to look more like their idols. Online games addicts playing for up to 50 hours straight and developing thrombosis, anorexia and heart problems and actually dropping dead in their chairs. Millions of people paying $15 a week, enough to feed 7 starving families in the 3rd world every week to play online games in virtual worlds because their privileged ones have become too boring. Kids making home videos of staged and real bullying and sexual assault for two minutes of addictive narcissistic ‘fame’ on You Tube. Teens have grabbed Daddy’s gun collection (or maybe they bought them at Wall mart) and gone on a murder spree to break the US on campus killing records and no doubt some other narcissists will dream of immortalization in upping the record some other time… and what for… to be some melodrama played out on TV this week and yesterdays news next week or at least next month. People are creating their avatars then recreating themselves in their image till there is nothing left of the original self – how comfortable, how convenient.

Pardon me for wondering if half the world (the affluent half) sought to build towers of Babel only to find themselves living in addictive stupors in Babylon thinking they’re in Eden.

Well, I’m no Christian, I’m not even religious, and I’m far from conservative (I’m certainly rather left of centre) but this was the content of this week’s news, documentaries and internet meanderings.

So what are the sane people doing in Dafur right now? Probably just running for their meagre lives. Hardly bears a mention perhaps for those living in exciting online worlds where they can star in their own Spielberg designed Second Lives.

Perhaps we need more challenging real lives, like really challenging. Do we need to be at risk of roaming wolves and bears (oh, yes, we killed all them, didn’t we… what a shame)? Would we then not have the luxury to care if our 6 year old got a matching bra to co-ordinate with her latest Bratz doll or how many virtual dollars we have to buy imagination which used to be free.
I’m lucky enough to be cursed with compulsive creativity. My husband is similarly lucky to be cursed with a lust for knowledge. What a shame we are to be relegated to the even farther reaches of a progressively ever marginalized brain-numbed, addicted, conformistly non-conformist society. This society which has had its sense sucked dry by marketing has embraced a sales pitch of free will whilst being distracted from practicing true individuality, imagination and social skills until they are relics of the past, no longer inherited.

The streets are emptying as we speak. See the Emperor’s New Clothes?

I don’t.

… Donna Williams

http://www.donnawilliams.net