Seeking an Alternate Reality

People are so mean here, and by "here" I mean in our society in the year 2011. Nowhere is this more obvious than on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Today's roasted meat is a 34-year-old actor named Ryan Dunn (see photo below) who rose to prominence on a TV show called "Jackass." He died in a fatal car crash yesterday, and today the twittering public is having a field day, despite he fact that that they watched his show and made his follow-up movies box-office hits; now they have decided he was a jackass himself after all, and are using his death as fodder for jokes, never mind his parents and friends who  are mourning his loss and who can see and hear everything.

Yet within this cold culture, it is consistently considered to be way over the line to describe a fat person as fat--how dare you!-- or to chide a politician for sending unsolicited lewd pictures to young women; after all, he was just having fun!

There simply must be another place to be, somewhere they don't say "it is what it is" as if it means something, and where laugh tracks are outlawed and robots don't make phone calls saying "there is no problem with your credit card account but it is urgent that you call us back right away." Where everyone eats healthy and does volunteer work and mourns the deaths of even silly people who are just doing the best they can. I thought Maine might be it, but it's pretty much life as usual up here, except for the lobster. However, there is no traffic, which is a step in the right direction.