Wisdom - our Only Remaining Taboo

     Situation comedies have for decades featured ridiculously immature adults - males and females. Reality shows are the same, but these supposedly "real" people in addition tend to have nasty attitudes. "Nuke them back into the stone age" movies make the most money. CNN drools over every violent incident. In a recent stand-up routine on TV, Chris Rock observed how women are just as happy as men to dance to outrageously misogynistic rap music - women and men in the audience laughed heartily. At the recent 72nd annual Golden Globe Awards, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler asked a series of actors "Who would you rather?", giving them two choices of actors of the opposite sex. Every actor, without a moment's hesitation, picked one on live television.
     Media saturate our consciousness with good-looking, sexy, obscenely rich "role-models", most of whom act like 2-year-old sociopaths. People start watching violent, sexually-explicit music videos and other pornography from early childhood.
     Clearly, "anything goes" today. But no, not quite! Mention the word "wisdom", and people run away as fast as they can.

     Wisdom: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2015/01/620-what-is-wisdom.html
     and: http://www.johnlovas.com/2012/04/psychospiritual-technologies.html

Stephen Alvarez, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

Peer Pressure

     "It was as if there were an audience to my life, that swirl of faces along the river, and in my head I could hear people screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself blush. I couldn't tolerate it. I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was.
     And right then I submitted.
     I would go to the war - I would kill and maybe die - because I was embarrassed not to."

     O'Brien T. "The things they carried." Mariner Books, Boston, 1990.