Wednesday, October 22, 2008

My society

I was watching Scrubs last night and I heard this song during the episode. It’s called “Ain’t no reason” by Bret Drennen. Now I couldn’t hear the lyrics exactly on the count of it was just playing in the background of the episode, but I caught a few phrases and the guitar sounded lovely, so I searched the song online and I found it on youtube along with its music video. I watched the video and realized what the song was about. It was a song about the world today and all the social issues that are in it.

The message of the song is simple: we as human beings most of the time, live our lives without thinking about the problems that the world faces. Personally, we might not be facing them or they might not be affecting us directly, but they’re still around. A lot of people take for granted the easy, normal lives that lead. They forget that behind the pleasure and luxury that they enjoy everyday, there are people suffering somewhere else. A lot of people say that they have problems that they can’t deal with, or that their lives are so off-track that they don’t know what they can do to fix. But what they don’t seem to understand or realize is that their problems are probably, nay most likely, mediocre when compared to those that are being faced world-wide.

We see these problems on TV all the time; global warming, oil leakage into our ocean, the war in Iraq, starving third world countries, unfair labor practices overseas, etc. All these issues were mentioned in the video. And when you watch it, you can’t help but feel a little bit guilty about not being able to do anything about these problems. It’s a dilemma really. The easiest one I can think of is the unfair labor practices. I don’t know about everyone else, but I know that most my clothes and shoes were probably made overseas and might be by workers who are underage, suffering from low wages, or working in an unsafe environment against their will. But here’s the kicker: I continue to buy sneakers made by Nike despite knowing that in the 1990s, they were in lawsuits for unfair labor practices in Vietnam. Am I to blame? Probably to certain to extent. But what are we supposed to do? The fact of the matter is, most of the clothing companies today are probably doing something that seems unethical in order produce and manufacture their products. So we can stop buying from one company and move on to the next, but what makes us so sure that this one doesn’t do the same thing, if not something worse?

It’s hard to admit, but there are just some things in life that we regular, every-day people cannot control. There are just problems that we can’t fix. And there are just decisions we can’t really make. I guess the bottomline is, it’s amazing how much we take for granted everyday; the amount of complaining and bitching we as Americans do; and the big deal of so very little things that we encounter.

If you wanna check it out, here’s the song and video on youtube:

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