Pain

Gay Glee and Galway Shifts

Glee

With 10million views in America alone, the episode entitled Prom from the hit Fox series Glee finally grew up. The series has for over a year now promised so much with gifted script writers and directors from such tv shows as Nip/Tuck and CSI New York who have toyed and frolicked with serious issues in modern western society from teen pregnancy to obesity and peer pressure and materialism. This episode was plot driven and at last absolutely nailed the growing problem of marginalization of homosexuality in our school systems. The performances of Chris Colfer and Max Adler were on a par with serious mainstream American television and regardless of whether one berates the show for cheesiness or not with this episode it finally matured and dealt with these serious issues head on and did so with a grown up script and in a manner that was open and constructive.
On the note of social problems our very own Shift Page at Nuig has made national headlines including with the Irish Examiner regarding the social issues related to the growing trend of humiliation and playfulness regarding tagging someone caught in the act! The actual reverberations of being tagged when having a supposed private movement being performed in a public place can be catastrophic with employers and family members witnessing these particularly lewd acts. There is nothing seriously immoral with uploading a picture of two people kissing if you have the select permission to release it on a public forum yet doing so and then refusing to take it down without their permission should lead to repercussions. The Irish legal system still has penalties for grazing of sheep in public places and crimes involving suits of armor and flocks of ducks showing its backwardness in relation to modern society and especially Internet Law. The Facebook Shift album is merely a phenomenon that will fizzle out and die very much like my earlier controversial articles. We have become accustomed to sex in our society and openly expressing of it whether it be homosexual or non and moving forward a lesson can be learned from Glee and also from the Shift Pages. As a western society we must learn to use the internet to respect as well as interact with others and the uproar regarding these photos will die away but the tags may remain for years to come.

With or Without You/Ourselves

Haiti Capital Devastated by Quake

The sun finally reminds us that it does in fact exist and the country goes into melt down, we deserve a good spell now, we deserve many good spells.

A new government, new weather and the President is rocking it up in Madrid, life seems pretty damn good, what is it that a sunny day does that leaves everything else in the back of ones mind.

As human beings we are easily distracted by simple materialistic objects and desires yet Japans recent disaster puts a lot into perspective;

We will wake up tomorrow morning, warm and safe, we will walk to the toilet and have running water and we will go online and have laptops, we will have clothes, we will have food, we will have a life!

Why is it that for the majority of us we have to see true suffering for it to show reality, to show that we are a society that desires too much and longs for control and influence yet mother nature can take it all away in less than 24hours.

We can fight and control so much in this world, but we cannot take on nature and win effectively, over 9000 people dead in a matter of minutes, shows how frail our existence truly is, our phones, our ipods, our existence is so frail yet we obsess about such simple things as the color of our cars and the shape of our hair.

In the years to come our world will have to face up to serious issues we have long tried to forget exist, oil crisis, middle east unrest and the widening divide between what is the western world and the east.

Japan is regarded as one of the strongest economies in not only Asia but also the world and it will bounce back but how does a country like Haiti cope with 4million homeless.  How will our world cope when money will no longer talk when the value of life will have to be seen as something true and real and not just a figure on a report.

With or without each other we will fall and falter, and as a people we have to move forward both in this country as a unit and find a resolution to our internal difficulties and as a race the history and the boundaries will have to crumble as we face into a century that will either make us or break us.