Okay, I'm going through my daily Blogs on GTP, my usual morning ritual now that we have a favorites function. I came across XideoXPG. I can't remember how I came to be on his site, but I remember I liked his blog. I mean he actually writes...stuff...yeah, shocker. I got around halfway through his post and I have to say... He's got some interesting points, but he never quite makes them. It's as though he's pushing an idea. Pushing it and pushing it, but never quite gets there. It's making for a really frustrating read. The thing that's making it worse has got to be all those question marks where there should be punctuation of quotation marks. That's horribly distracting and it's not the only blog where I've seen that. Maybe it's my computer. I have no idea.
Still, he's brought up a really important topic and despite the frustration I'm feeling at trying to read it and despite the distractions I'm getting from the bad formatting I still feel it's a very worthy topic. I think I'd like to address some of the issues I think I've picked up on his article.
Regarding Celebrity Messages on TV: "...as much as I hate most celebrities out there who pull off these kinds of things just to get more face..." Xideo feels that celeb's only reason for making TV messages such as "Don't Drink & Drive", "Don't Do Drugs", "Child Abuse is Bad" is quite simply to get their faces on television. I think one important thing that Xideo doesn't quite get is...yes, they're celebrities and yes, maybe they are doing it for more than one reason. Maybe their reason IS in fact just what you suspect, but why does that matter? How does that cheapen the message they are putting out there? Drugs are still bad, drinking while driving is still bad, child abuse is still bad... The fact is that people are cows. If nothing interesting is going on to catch our attention we'll just continue swatting our own asses and eating potato chips in front of the tele. The fact is that those messages are very important, they do matter and they make a difference. I should know. When I was a child I too saw the messages about child abuse..."Tell Someone." I told someone. I didn't see the celebrity. I saw the message and I hope others see it too.
The Celebrity Message that sparked his blog: "Children are not naturally born racist, however they will learn to hate, often before they understand why, never let hate in" Now we get to the crux of the matter. His reason for blogging today. Racism. It's a heated topic and one, which could very easily and very quickly get out of hand. This is one of the reasons why things like this should be handled with care...If you’re responsible. "...But I still can’t talk about this without having some guilt impulses run through me. My feelings really are not fueled by my own race, but moreover my relationship with others around me of different races." He never does talk about those feeling though and this is the type of thing that has made reading this blog so frustrating. I've never quite seen anyone skirt around an issue like this.
He goes on to discuss the 911 attacks and now this affected his Muslim friends in school. I find it terribly sad that he would have to defend his friends against people in his school after such a horrible ordeal. I would much rather hear about the things he and his friends went through during the aftermath than the Oj Simpson trial and how everyone around him reacted to the verdict. Regardless of how adults reacted you have to take our system into consideration. Innocent until proven guilty. Not very many people believed in that and the sad fact about it is that it goes beyond color. Plain and simple, the system sucks and finding the right answers is really hard. The outcome simply doesn't matter anymore. He didn't get away with it because he was black. He got away with it because they couldn't prove his guilt. If people around you think otherwise...educate them.
"Ever since I was very little I noticed this was happening." What did you notice was happening?????? This is what I mean by frustrating. I want to know what he's thinking but he's not telling me. grrrrr
We finally start getting to something a little deeper when he says, "The stereotypes are not beyond race; they are also within subcultures of us;" If I understand what he's trying to say at all then he means that stereotypes have gone beyond race. The thing, I think, that needs to be understood here is that we're only human. This means that normally we stick to our own kind or people that think, feel or act like us. It's natural. It's how man has survived throughout the ages. It's basic and fundamental Darwinism at it's finest. Goth's stick with goths, emo's stick with emo's, blacks stick with blacks, white's stick with whites...Then you get the few crazy people who truly walk to the beat of their own drum that don't fit into any of those categories you can think of whether they're black, white, green, brown or purple. Could he be one of those people???
He's definitely not wrong when he says, "...but I am willing to bet that anyone who reads this can picture the majority of those groups mentioned, moreover show some discomfort if they were near one." In fact I think it made me chuckle. That's a very good observation Xideo well done.
I AM CLAPPING AT MY DESK!!!!! This statement instilled in me the emotion that he truly feels towards racism and stereotyping. "Weather it is separation based on Religion, Race, Ethnicity, Nationality, or even Subculture (IE: Jocks and Nerds), this aspect of humanity is ever present. These ideas are present in our media, present in our society, even when we try to escape from it, it is present.
We may try to teach our children to go pass this, try to block it from them, but as each generation passes us, all of them (including us) fall into this hole. It?s been imbedded into us since our dawning, even before civilizations flourished and we were just savages. We would be based on tribes that practiced Xenophobia." Thus the survival of man.
So, I think I learned something about my friend Xideo today. Racism and stereotyping, no matter how indifferent he may be with you to your face, really and truly does bother him. THAT'S what I wanted and THAT'S what I got out of his last few paragraphs. I think I got a lot out of his blog today. Now I'm very happy. Xbox Live - GamertagPics XideoXPG Profile
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