Brandon Elliott
English 1104
February 9, 2011
When you think about America as a labyrinth, an intricate maze of corporate funding and Monday night football games, an excess of distractions, expensive cars, and so much food that we go hunting on full stomachs, all of these privileges suddenly seem to be strung together by the one fact that we subconsciously love to ignore, and that is that we’re all passengers of the same sinking ship and we don’t even realize it. The subconscious efforts to ignore this fact are based on a media-driven warpath, sheltered by buying and selling, and from the time we were born into the “safe sphere” until the time we either choose to come out of it, or don’t, we are not really in control of ourselves. We’re controlled by the things we buy, the things we love, the things we believe, and the things we do—and this reality is one, whether we realize it or not, that’s created and maintained by the pain, suffering, and loss of others in less fortunate realities. To quote Isaac Newton, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” This is a well-known scientific truth, but the question is—Does it translate into an emotional or mental truth as well? Is our happiness a result or a cause of someone else’s sadness? Would we be able to live in the “fantasmatic scream” if others weren’t living in extreme poverty and slavery? And if not, how are we supposed to step out of this “bubble” in a way that is comfortable to us and beneficial to the world around us at the same time?
John Green, a well-known novelist, said “Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.” The modern age has created a certain aspect of escaping and creating your own truth, and using that to get through the day, so that even if blood is being shed for the diamonds that we wear on our fingers, the same fingers that might even be responsible for the death that produced them, we can look the other way and still go to sleep at night on our comforters and Giorgio Armani sheets. It’s because of this that reality is a matter of opinion, and the internet is just one of many perfect examples of such obliviousness. As soon as we get home, many of us go online and check our Facebook accounts. The majority of the posts there are probably about how we had a terrible day because we stepped in a mud puddle or something mildly dramatic like that. The reality labyrinth, as I like to call it, is something that fools you into thinking you’re bad off, when meanwhile, you have it ten times as good as the person who sewed together the soccer ball you played with when you were a kid or the Nike shoes you wore to kick it around with. And still, somehow, it’s not even our fault that the shades have been pulled down over our eyes.
When we turn on the television and change the channel to the latest “reality” TV show craze, we are examining how the labyrinth works. Real people with real lives act on “reality” shows (that are actually just as fake as other television shows) to relieve other people of their own realities. It’s a vicious cycle that, unless you stop and think about it, you don’t even know you are a part of. The media has a certain effect on our irreal society which blurs the line between entertainment and education. We learn from ridiculous television shows such as “My Super Sweet 16”, which focuses on throwing the most extravagant and outrageous sixteenth birthday parties ever thrown, whilst basically teaching viewers indirectly that they need to have a party that costs upwards of a million dollars; that money buys happiness. Between commercial breaks, sponsorships, and shows created for the sole purpose of selling more stuff, by the time an avid television watcher enters “the real world”, they are primed and prepared for the consumerist society in which we live in. Our entertainment feeds our selfish habits.
The movie “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” displays the mindset that is supposedly needed to make it big in Western Civilization. The first idea proposed, simply by the title, is that money is everything. The second idea is that money is everything and nothing will stand in the way between a backstabbing, lying, and generally bad person, and their everything. In the film, Gordon Gekko is a macho stock trader that is quoted as saying “Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs? They get slaughtered.” In the irreal realm that is America, we are full to bursting with bulls and bears and our comfortability level is so incredibly precious and ridiculous that we even pay other bulls and bears to slaughter the pigs for us, in places that are convenient for us even if it’s extremely inconvenient for others. We don’t, in any real fashion, observe any of the pain that is caused by our happiness, because the media is controlled by the government, and if morale is low, the economy is low. When we’re happy, we buy. When we’re happy, America is.
And so this reality labyrinth, in my opinion, will not be escaped by any of us that are living in America, because to survive we must take part in it. It’s in our blood, it’s in our souls, it’s in our minds, and to destroy that, we must be destroyed. Every Roman Empire must have its downfall, and in our case, I believe that we will go down this path, surrounded by a bubble of unawareness, surrounded by wealth and scripted television shows and haste, until we’re drowning in so much bad karma, that like the Titanic, we sink and forever remain, much like our lives, a fairy tale with a sad, sad ending.
