1. If you don’t actually wear petticoats and high-necked dresses all the time, you shouldn’t pretend to hold to the same sexual or moral ethic that Victorian England did. And if you feel like I’m giving the Victorians a hard rap, remember that I don’t do the same thing for the Puritans or for Isaac and his particular sporting spirit. It’s not that I don’t like Victorian culture. And it’s not that I think people should be dogging it all over High Park like a pack of coyotes. But at the same time, if you want to act like something doesn’t exist, try not making it sex, but instead fruitcake. Really, who likes fruitcake?

2. The odd thing about the youth culture we have nowadays is that it’s self-perpetuating. Even magazines that purport to step outside the culture or into the counter-culture - like Adbusters does - are part of the problem. No, wait, they are are the problem. Did you ever wonder why they’re now peddling a shoe? And a Media Freedom Kit? Because rebellion is business. And Adbusters - suprise! - is a business. They sell things, like a magazine, and a shoe, and a kit. They perpetuate the very thing they fight against by perpetuating the same tired attitudes of rebellion against authority, manifested in tattoos andreally cool hoodies.

3. What is a team? A team is a collection of individuals with a common cause. Is the common cause more important than the individual cause? Who knows. Functionally, these things don’t have to be different but often are. Individualism, of course, is a silly modern idea, but still, we are individuals all functioning in a group setting.

4. Christmas is the stupidest and most annoying season of the year, and not because the season is about Christ. No, it’s because the season lasts so darn long, and while it obstensibly about Christ, it’s tacitly about the final heaving surges of consumerism the year has to offer before we begin all over again on January. It wouldn’t bother me at all if we had numerous month-long advent celebrations: they tend to be low-key, and all you need is a few candles and maybe some evergreen leaves. But instead we have this malarky of elves and Santa Claus and giving overpriced presents to assuage our aching consciences. Christmas has been turned into a time to do pennance for the evil of the year; we spend time with the family, donate to charity, and give gifts. Of course, when the month is over, we abandon our families, the fatherless, and the widows.

5. Back to the individual: we need a social conscience. It’s painfully obvious that if some people feel free to drive around a Hummer with on person in it all day while other people carpool in their Ford Focus, something is being done right, and something is being done wrong. Are we, men and woman of the consumerist era, ready to forgo some freedom in order to give a shot at responsibility? Think about it. Maybe you can take the bus. Maybe you can replace some lightbulbs with energy-efficient ones. Maybe you can recycle as much as you possibly can. Who knows? But at least do something.

6. CSI has become excruciatingly boring. It’s a gimmick show, build around a rapidly aging device. That’s right, CSI, you need drama, mystery, and suspense just like every other show since Shakespeare. Not just some extremely cool shots of the inside of a human brain colliding with a bullet, or some gooey human remains in a trunk. Yawn. Boring. People have been killing eachother since Cain. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, until Nick gets trapped inside a box with ants and a bomb. But the good guys always win, right? And goodness knows, the CSI staff are the good guys. Annoyingly good.

7. Either you believe in free will, or you don’t. It’s that simple. Everything is connected, right? Well if everything is connected, then you either control the whole bag of tricks down to the smallest building blocks, or you don’t control anything at all. And since I don’t believe in free will, due to reading scripture and whatnot, God must control everything. But that brings online a whole slew of other questions, such as the question of evil and sin and pain and suffering. I trust my mind is too small to actually understand these things. That makes it easier.

8. Getting back to crappy modern thought, how’s feminism doing these days? Oh, not too well? Darn. But did you ever wonder what feminism is really all about? So did I, and it turns out it’s quite simple: feminism is about merging the public and private spheres in order to “empower” and “liberate” women. The thinking goes like this: the public sphere is a man’s world, and the private sphere is where the woman has been trapped in her gender role as mother, housekeeper, and maidservant for those horrible, abusive, testosterone-crazed men. So instead of trying to give men wombs and breasts - which is pretty darn expensive - so that they can be the mothers, the thinking is that the public and private spheres must be merged to give as much opportunity as possible to the woman, who can then break out of her maternal chains. Then we can feminise men and convert the family to a wonderful power-sharing commune where the father and mother have equal authority and there’s no such thing as veto power. Even better - get rid of the vestiges of the patriarchy by redefining family altogether! Okay then. Y’all do that, and I’ll use the heat of your burning cities to roast marshmallows.

9. Privacy is important. It should be important to every Christian. And the Bush administration’s rush to take away personal privacy in the name of preventing terrorism will do more damage in the long run than a thousand people a year killed by carbombs.

10. I hate typing on this computer. Consider this little document finito.

Tags: opinions