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Infuriating! Three Statements Designed to Offend
Everyone will find the following three statements upsetting. Trigger Warning!
It’s intentional. I have designed the following three statements to make you react emotionally. When I was a young adult, I fully embraced the emotions of all my favorite songs from Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” to Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” to the theme from Robert Altman’s feature film, M*A*S*H, “Suicide is Painless”. These songs and countless others like them spoke my emotional truth.
No matter what I was upset about, there was a song to sing about that emotion. Sing-a-long, sing out loud and feel it from the depths of the gut. While I used to argue that these lyrics provided a cathartic release for my existential crises of the day, I now realize that they merely inflamed my emotions and made me more upset.
As my self-awareness grew, I placed music in its rightful place in my life. Music is entertainment, not a cathartic psychological healer. After music lost its power over me, I found that statements by some people unnecessarily provoked me. For example, when an authority figure lies or a journalist claiming to present the facts instead presents an opinion marginally supported by distortion of select facts.
In my mind, the revolutionary call to “Question Authority” was soon supplemented by “Everyone Lies”. When trying to make sense of the world, it is frustrating to realize that most facts are a matter of perspective and most historical stories are told to promote a political goal.
In his 1839 play, regarding Cardinal “Richelieu. Or the Conspiracy”, English playwright, Edward Bulwer Lytton, first coined the phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword.” As every author hopes to accomplish, Edward managed to encapsulate an eternal truth within an entertaining and lasting word pill.
Thoughts as recorded by the “pen” outlast even the most violent attempts to silence those ideas. The Bible and several scriptures from world religions are examples of the written word surviving countless wars fought to destroy them.
Upsetting statement number one:
Human life is a lie.
Some trends of the lie help an individual progress to a more enlightened state, but most degrade the…
