The Road Less Traveled

My apologies for taking so long to put another post on here. Things have been busy the past few days and I have not gotten a chance to make another post. Some may resort to just throwing together a tiny insignificant post just to make sure they have one for that day, but I only want to write posts that are longa and have meaning. I am not saying that a post has to be long to have meaning, but I am merely stating that I want it to be a solid, good post. If I can't take the time in a day to sit down and write a good, lengthy post then I would rather not write one at all for that day. With that said I am going to try and cover quite a few topics today, and most are about the giant road that so many travel down in our society and the thin, narrow road that few even look at. I love Christmas, and it is by far my most favorite season of the year. I am so enticed by this holiday and season because of all the joy that is connected to it and how it is such a cheerful time. There are things going on though that are getting worse and worse and they are really beginning to irritate me. I will try to not be the typical blogger critic who spends all his or her posts just complaining about everything he or she can think of, but this does need to be stated. I can't stand the complainers who just complain just to complain and feel important, so I am writing this in hopes that someone may read it and actually take it to heart. BLACK FRIDAY NEEDS TO STOP!! It sickens me how people act on Black Friday. Okay I get it you want a deal, and you want to save some money when buying gifts. That is great, and I like a good deal too, but at what cost? First, lets get a few things straight, Black Friday does not give you a deal on much at all. Everything is marked up an average of 30%, so if you are not getting an item at more than at least 30% off then you are actually getting no deal at all. Second, the items you are buying are special Black Friday items that are made with far cheaper materials. This is why a lot of the electronics malfunction or break shortly after Christmas, and the month of January is spent returning things or getting angry over stuff that has stopped working. Companies anticipate Black Friday and make things a lot cheaper to make sure they are still making a nice, fat profit. So when you thing you are getting a steal of a deal you are not, and you are actually getting exactly what you pay for. You pay less and you get less. For the sake of my point though lets disregard those two truths and pretend that you actually are getting an amazing deal. How much morality and humanity are you giving up to save those few dollars? There is the typical complaint about it starting on Thanksgiving, which many have heard before from others I would guess. This is true though, because that is an entire day dedicated to giving thanks for our good fortune and all the things in our lives that God has graced us with. Instead of doing this though millions of people freak out over Black Friday, loose sight of the important things in life, act like a brutish animal, leave their families, and spend their Thanksgiving fighting people for items that will eventually break or decay like everything else. It just drives me crazy how materialistic people have become. I get that you want the deal, but for Black Friday I did not leave my house until around 4:30 and I casually went to one store, got what I wanted, and left. I still got my deal, I still got the gift I needed to buy, I still got it very cheap, and I did it all without missing time with my loved ones or fighting people to do it. I am not saying that Black Friday as a day needs to stop, but how we go about it has to stop. Stores should not open until 7 or 8 in the morning on Friday like they always do, and people just need to calm down. How sad and barbaric are we when we will stab another person over a parking spot or trample a person to death over a discounted toy? It sickens me to hear about things like that and if I had been a police officer at that Wal-Mart when that happened I would have started arresting everyone in the front of the line who even walked by that poor employee without helping or stopping. For a person to be trampled to death at least 40 to 50 people had to have walked by him stepping on and kicking him as they did so without even caring enough to help. So 40 to 50 people (probably even more) participated in killing a person so they could save some money. Does anyone remember the movie where the couple got a choice to push a red button and receive a million dollars, but someone in the world would die? The majority of people would agree that this is morally wrong and you should not hit the button, but by what I see Black Friday is even worse! Not only are we killing someone, but we aren't even getting a million dollars for it. We are doing just to save at most probably around $100 to $150 dollars. This is less than half the price of the new game consoles that just came out! So as a society we are agreeing that a human life is worth less than $100 and in that case we need to let all the hit-mans and assassins know because they charge an average rate of close to $20,000. If only the angry wives knew that all they had to do was pay a Wal-Mart customer $100 to kill their husband instead of a hit-man thousands. This should be a season of joy and happiness, but because of greedy, self-centered Americans there is multiple families grieving this season over injured family members and even one that is grieving the loss of a loved one who was only there because he needed to work. We have become a society centered completely around ourselves and we are raised with the lesson that our own success is the most important thing. We trample over anyone who gets in our way (pun not intended). It infuriates me to watch how people deal with others in the world. People are so focused on their own lives that they treat everyone else like dirt. I will stop rambling on about this, because it is something that is so obvious in society yet so ignored. I went on for a bit too long with that one topic, but I believe that it needed the attention. The next thing I want to talk about is another topic that is no more happy then the previous one, and that is the things that are beginning to become acceptable in our society. I just want to point out that the title is what it is for a reason, and that is because I am talking about things that are becoming major problems. This applies to so many things from television to clothing, but the biggest one that bothers me the most is television and movies. Clothing is definitely a probably with it getting more and more promiscuous, but I won't go on and on about that. I feel like the former is a much larger issue. TV and movies is a huge part of our society now, and almost every kid is raised watching one if not both. I have been noticing the more and more that I go out to the movies or turn on the TV that it is getting exponentially worse. I will flip to a simple show on TV and start watching when all of a sudden this incredibly vulgar joke is made or this scene appears that is very inappropriate. I don't mean to sound like the old grandpa about this, but how much is too much? I child could have accessed the exact channel that I was watching. It was not an adult channel, but rather just one of the average channels among the basic listings. It would infuriate me if I had a child and he was watching what appeared to be a funny show that all of a sudden started talking like that and showing extremely unnecessary scenes. It did not add anything to the show or make it any funnier. It is beginning to get to the point where we cannot have a show or movie without some form of sexual theme to it. If you are a giant pervert and want that in your movies and shows then go on the internet because there is tons of it for you, but keep it out of basic cable and movies. I can't stand to be watching a great movie, but have it be ruined by a completely unnecessary scene that added nothing to the plot. It is different if movie just "implied" that something happened, but to come right out and borderline make a pornography for a few minutes in the film is completely ridiculous. A great movie to use as an example is the movie Internship. Don't worry I won't give any spoilers, but I will say that the movie overall was very mild. There wasn't hardly any inappropriate jokes or bad language through the whole film except for one small scene that lasted probably about 15 to 20 minutes. It showed multiple scenes of nudity for long periods of time and was extremely sexual. It added nothing to the plot of the story that could not have been achieved much easier, and it did not fit with the entire rest of the movie. I feel like those things are added because the director is probably some old guy who wants to film some boobs and uses his movie as an excuse to do it. Everyone knows what I am talking about when I mention the obviously not needed scenes in movies where there is just random nudity for no apparent reason. If a person wants to see that then go watch porn like all the other perverts out there, but a movie should be based on plot and acting not the amount of sexual comments or scenes you can show. The rating of these movies are also getting lower and lower. What would have been considered an X rated movie is now in the R rated range and things that would have definitely been R rated have become PG13. We have these ratings for a reason and that is so parents can make sure their kids aren't opened up to all that. I know some will yell and say that a child needs to be opened up to how society truly is, and to that I say bull crap. It is bad enough that society is actually like that, but that does not mean that an innocent kid needs to see it or hear it. It is proven that the earlier you are introduced to those kinds of things the more okay you will think they are. We need to get a grip on our morality and realize how far our values have fallen. This change in our film and TV is having a huge affect on the coming generations. They are getting more and more number to things that they shouldn't even know about at their age. What is sad is that I wanted to end the post on a happy note after all the negativity, but I can't think of any news that I have gotten lately that is happy (this is why I avoid the news completely). Everything I have heard about lately involves Black Friday attacks and madness, more crime, or other depressing things happening around the world. I just wish we could get back to the important things in life and that is people. I wish we would stop focusing so much on ourselves and start focusing on others. There needs to be less sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and more love (not that kind of love), people gathering together, and joy. What I feel for our society is not so much anger or hatred, but more along the lines of great sadness for the condition we are in and the even worse future we are heading towards. For any people who agree and want to see more love and caring in our world please comment or follow or anything else you can do because it would really mean a lot to me to see that there are others who want to get back to the important things in life.
Sincerely - CO