{"id":723,"date":"2011-04-29T14:06:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-29T19:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/?p=723"},"modified":"2011-04-29T15:26:59","modified_gmt":"2011-04-29T20:26:59","slug":"confession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/2011\/04\/29\/confession","title":{"rendered":"I Have a Confession to Make"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I watched it.<\/p>\n<p>Yup. Woke up just before 6am this morning and turned on the TV to BBC America, just in time for the service. I watched the royal wedding. I watched Prince William and Catherine Middleton get married, just like the whole rest of the world.<\/p>\n<p>At Westminster Abbey, which I visited when I was in London a year and a half ago, so that was kind of cool on its own! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n<p>In spite of the annoying obsessions over it, positive and negative, I still watched it.<\/p>\n<p>Then again, why not? It was cute. It was neat. The people on the ground there watching the event and decked out in union jack-themed costumes were hilariously cheesy. It was seeing the continuance of old tradition. It made lots of people happy.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nI mean, there are ethical issues with it, sure, depending on who you ask. Some are whether the royal family should even still exist. Some are the amount of tax-payer money that went into it. Some involve issues with preparation. Valid concerns.<\/p>\n<p>And there&#8217;s the complaints that since this has been going on, it&#8217;s all the news seems to want to talk about, setting things like Japan&#8217;s seismo-nuclear clusterfuck and Middle East uprisings on the backburner. Those things are definitely more important than the royal wedding, yes. No argument there. But I do have to ask&#8230; did you really expect anything different?<\/p>\n<p>Of course the media is going to focus so much on the royal wedding! Lots of people are interested and it&#8217;s a lighter topic. That&#8217;s what the media does. Don&#8217;t be so shocked when it&#8217;s doing the same thing it&#8217;s always done. This is why I generally don&#8217;t watch the news. They don&#8217;t cover anything I want to really hear about. CNN and others are going to talk about this and Obama&#8217;s birth certificate ad nauseum, that is to be expected, that&#8217;s what they do, so the nice easy solution to that is, obviously, get your news elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p><!--- Yeah, there are significantly fewer reporters in Japan and the Middle East than at the royal wedding. But few is not the same as none. The news from those locations and their respective situations is still out there. You just have to seek it out. It's not going to come to you. In fact, with TV news dying and online news and blogs being the main thing, picking and choosing which news you want to read about is sort of how it works. If you don't want to read an article about the royal wedding, you can just, you know, not read it. Hell, I watched the damn thing this morning yet I actually read next to nothing about it.\n\nAnd I'm not sure the Japanese and the Middle Easterners could give a shit less what our media is and isn't focusing on. Hell, they're probably glad the royal wedding is getting so much attention since if they were instead our media would be totally telling it wrong, hehe. But in any case, I don't think whether Joe Six-Pack American is hearing enough about what they're dealing with is really near the top of their concerns.\n\nOr is it yet another \"how dare you be happy about a pointless event when there are bad things happening in the world?\" First of all, try going to where the bad things are happening. Even in the most disaster-stricken, poverty-stricken, war-torn regions, the people still celebrate stuff! They're not huddled in a corner crying all day and night, waiting for some rich westerners to think about them. They're still living their lives, celebrating their culture, and even getting married themselves! Why? Because, damn it, people need these happy normal celebrations. They need the joy and to forget the problems of the world if only for a little while. It's not a matter of people being stupid or uncaring. It's a matter of sanity. It's a respite from the otherwise unhappiness and devastation. It's a sign of hope, that there is joy in the world, and it's only through maintaining hope that the unhappiness and devastation can be overcome. And, besides, who says that one can't be interested in the royal wedding AND voraciously watch the happenings in Japan and the Middle East? Why are they assumed to be mutually exclusive?\n\nAnd it's not just the royal wedding. It's also the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. It's the Superbowl. It's the World Series. It's the Olympics. It's Dick Clark's New Year's Eve. It's the Academy Awards. It's any number of other such events that many will decry as distracting from the \"real\" things people should be thinking about. But who says people aren't thinking about these things already? We have the capability of caring about the pointless and the important at the same time. ---><\/p>\n<p>There are more serious issues and they need attention, yes. But life is too short to be uselessly bitter, and, goddamn it, we need the less serious fun stuff now and then!<\/p>\n<p>And to listen to William and Kate&#8217;s vows including the words &#8220;for richer or poorer&#8221; and to giggle and say &#8220;richer is underlined&#8221;. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I watched it. Yup. Woke up just before 6am this morning and turned on the TV to BBC America, just in time for the service. I watched the royal wedding. I watched Prince William and Catherine Middleton get married, just like the whole rest of the world. At Westminster Abbey, which I visited when I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/2011\/04\/29\/confession\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;I Have a Confession to Make&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,29,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-idiot-box","category-think-about-it"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":725,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723\/revisions\/725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}