weak excuses for bad behavior

I wrote this back in October, but forgot to post it.

I like it.

There's bad language. parents, don't let the kids read it until you have.

October 18
11:00pm
I don’t like it when people create weak excuses for their bad behavior.

“My hair just can’t handle being oily (giggle giggle),” is not adequate justification for showering every day in a drought-stricken country. It’s disgusting, actually.

But then again, don’t we all do it? Don’t we seek to quiet the demons within in unhealthy ways, claiming that “these are the years of our lives”, “you’re only young once,” “I’m going to enjoy college?” And we smoke and drink and fuck the hell out of it all. We obscure our reflections, we chop others to pieces and leave them strewn about in our wake.

We live in the richest country on earth, are privileged in ways that only hedonistic, vain, and corrupt nobility used to be. Now we’re the corrupt nobility, and our marble thrones are too high for us to begin to feel the scorching heat of the sand below. The sand that everyone else has to live on, breathe in, tend, harvest, eat, sleep, dream, and die in. There’s no sand where we come from. We don’t even have the concept of desert.

We can only read about the desert. Sitting in the Sahara won’t help us conceptualize it. Joyful rides on spitting camels across cool dunes in mid October won’t do shit to help us understand how desert dwellers live. Taking pictures of the fly-covered faces of brown eyed toddlers won’t change the situation. We can buy a ticket back to New York City, we can leave tomorrow.

And perhaps that’s the problem. We have the ability to leave any difficulty that we have ever, will ever face. More disturbing is the fact that we have the privilege to see and touch any difficulty — our dollar will get us far — in order to take photographs, return home, frame them, hang them on walls and call them art. Since when is it ethical to put a lense in the face of a blind and toothless man, shutter clicking away as he cocks his head towards the sound, wondering what is going on? Since when is it art to watch a child cry and position yourself just right so that the sunlight reflects off his tears?

Congratulations. You won the photo contest.