I’ve come to a conclusion. Hollywood is bad, as much as I love it (and by “Hollywood,” I mean the whole media world). Think about it. Where do we get all of our ideas from?
-Normal weight is bad, uber skinny is good.
-All men are afraid of commitment, no women are.
-Everything (and I mean everything) must be fast-paced. There is nothing good about slow. Even the shows about the future are more fast-paced than today is, forcing onto us the expectation of speeding up even further as we go along.
-FBI, CIA and other government jobs are high-action and highly secretive, therefore highly entertaining and should be highly sought after.
-Obese people should be made fun of.
-There are conspiracies everywhere.
-Personality doesn’t matter. It’s all in the looks.
I could go deeper and less obvious. What about faithfulness? There are movies and TV shows out there that suggest that, once someone is married, it’s still possible for them to find “true love.” Um. Hi. Why didn’t they just wait to get married until they were sure that they loved the person? And once they were sure, why did they decide that it wasn’t enough? I swear, nobody realizes anymore that “true love” takes work. The story doesn’t end when you find it – that’s only the beginning. There will be hills to climb and battles to fight for the rest of your lives after finding each other. But from what I hear, if you stick together and fight side-by-side, it’s well worth it. We need some movies of people doing just that for once, rather than simply finding each other and that’s the end.
As for our conception of beauty, I won’t even get into that except to say, how many people are bulimic, anorexic, depressed, obsessed, and just don’t see themselves for who they really are because of Hollywood’s standards for beautiful?
And what about the men? I think they get some kind of idea of how they should act from the ideas that the media plants in our heads. For instance: non-committal, heartless, insensitive, violent, devoid of emotion, after one thing, etc, etc, etc. Any guy who doesn’t meet that description must not be a real man. If he cries, he’s a wuss. If he’s not afraid of commitment, he’s hiding something. If he’s sensitive, he’s girly and undesirable. If he prefers the arts over sports, he’s gay. The guy in the chick flick that comes around and wants romance and the girl is “nonexistent.” I am most definitely guilty of this frame of mind – I see guys as very predictable and one-track-minded. Which, for all I know, they are. But if that's true, would it be because of the influences in our lives and the way they are now expected to act? Or do we write according to what we see, suggesting that they truly are that way? Or is it a cycle where we exaggerate what we see for dramatic effect, thus inspiring more to be as we wrote, creating the need to be more dramatic in our writings, causing a more frightening inspiration for those who watch and read?
If that is the case (and I suspect it is because things are getting worse and so is the media), we are digging a deeper and deeper hole for ourselves. None of us are seeing reality for what it is. We prefer the escape. If life doesn’t go as we see it go for so many others who are putting on a show, we have a tendency to ignore it or run away or deal with it in some way unique to us but is ineffective nonetheless - such as actually acting out what we see.
We have lost sight of who we really are, what we’re really worth; assuming we ever saw it to begin with. Even if we didn’t, I do believe that we at least had a better idea than we do now. We are so much more than the shapes of our bodies, the clearness of our skin, the color of our hair and our eyes. We’re more than our weaknesses, we’re more than someone else’s strengths. We’re more than the bad things that go on here, which seem to be the bulk of things we are told about. We are at the top of the animal kingdom, acting less than the lowliest of animals. Killing each other; raping; back stabbing; ridiculing; judging; fighting; mentally, emotionally, physically torturing each other. Where do we get off? We need to be who we really are, who we really can be! We need to stop letting people tell us who we are and make up our own minds of who we want to be, then act accordingly.
Perhaps one day we’ll get there. I believe that we can. We are humans. It is in our nature both to become what we can and yet to not make it that far. For now I’ll choose to believe in the best of us and hope to God that something happens to help us succeed. Because we obviously can’t do it on our own. We prefer to stick to what the media feeds us and make that our reality. And although there can be good in there, we tend to focus on the negative and damaging, which is getting us nowhere.
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