Daily Grime

   I remember as a kid having so many hilarious laughs with middle school and high school friends whenever we would say "What if someone did such and such," and it would be some inappropriate thing that we all knew was absurd.  And everyone had a basic understanding of societal norms, and how terrible it would be to see some kind of embarrassing commercial when you were with your grandmother, or how wrong it would be for a teacher to do something crazy like show pornography in class. I think that these standards in our minds became the foundation for some deep appreciation of hilarious jokes, some of which were homemade, and some of which were expertly presented in movies and on TV.
    But now, as if someone went and dumped all the spices ever made into everyone's food and drinks and even ice cream, we have nasty images and nasty jokes and nasty music in our faces and minds constantly everywhere we turn.  People can say that is not true but I do not believe them.  If you need to make some copies at an office store, you will get it done while listening to a top 40 song that is more explicit than a medical anatomy class and has people making actual sexual noises. Bus drivers who wanted decent, honest work, suddenly find themselves driving down the road with huge underwear ads featuring completely naked people on their bus for everyone to see.  I really can't think of anything more disrespectful to a community and especially to a worker doing their job. How disgusting. If you say anything about it, you are considered a prude, but I think that most people, and possibly everyone, knows in their hearts that our culture has a problem and it probably is contributing to high rates of abuse, and isn't that far from abuse itself. Some people get no break from it and do not even know what it is like to think about other things and play regular games and care about a normal movie storyline or hear a song that isn't some nasty metaphor, or even that is a metaphor instead of being a base and crude description of bodily functions.  There used to be such a thing as a dirty joke, because some jokes weren't dirty. Now the people behind and in front of the media are the dirty jokes who have ruined our society.  When I speak out about it or even frown, people literally turn up the music louder to humiliate me, but I will still make my case for a Muzak revolution, not because it is my job to clean all the rapists' minds, but because I know that things were funnier and life was zippier when dirt had its place, and that place wasn't everywhere.