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Get Real
Unaware of global suffering, glamour
seekers live in excess
By Abby Weinzer
Staff Writer
As summer break approaches, many young persons turn to the matter of their appearance. They examine the reality of their winter-worn bodies: the particular way last summerĖs swimsuit fits, the condition of the skin due to lack of sunshine. While looking through a popular magazine, I saw a picture of a ubiquitous, pop puppet decked in typical summer regalia: jeans, t-shirt, and sunglasses. As many young people, especially women do, I realized that her outfit on my person would look completely different. I began to stress about superficiality, about the way I might look if I had the good fortune to be lavished with diamonds and designer clothes. Perhaps if I could be a just a bit taller, with a tad less here and little more there, I could look like a desirable, fashionable, attractive young woman. While I was reading this popular periodical, a news story began on the television about the illegal pay-by-the-piece-work factories and child labor. I saw images of tiny ones being forced to sit in crammed spaces and crank out export souvenirs for only pennies a day. I sat with my magazine in hand. It was filled with images of striking young models, actors and singers, and I listened to the terrors of abject poverty right here in my own hometown. I was in a doorway between the unrealistic and the frighteningly true. Although it seems clichģ, my own self-deprecation became obscenely foolish. How sad, that the human psyche can be debased to the point of self-loathing by something as inconsequential as the image of people who have no greater contribution to this world than writhing their rhinestone-clad bodies to mind-numbing beats?
ItĖs the old carrot-on-a-stick scenario. The public will follow some trend or idea while it is being dangled in our faces. We relentlessly pursue that little nugget of manufactured happiness, which lures us into the mire of self-deprecation. Who holds the stick? Who diverts our attention from awareness of others to the salivating over airbrushed, cookie-cutter images that we cannot be? It is ourselves, the non-famous. We allow individuals to be placed on a pedestal while we worship at their feet. They say, wear this brand of clothing, and many of us do. They say, listen to this philosophy, and many pay undivided attention. What are we left with? Lemmings. Many young people will follow an idea or a person right off a cultural cliff and plunge into a sea of sameness. Sameness is a symptom of a diseased popular culture. "Isms" are what happens when sameness progresses. Fascism. Elitism. Separatism. Racism. The fact is, Americans are the grand escapists. In order to avoid discomfort, we will open a fashion magazine or turn to MTV and view elitism as reality. In essence, I am not all that different from the people in my magazine (minus the luxury cars and fake body parts) because I am human. We all have flaws. Some are just better at hiding them than others, especially if hiding them involves an agent, a makeup artist, an entourage÷. |
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Last updated: June 4, 2002 |
