Pop music (not including country) has had the focus on romantic love for as long as I can remember. That's nice, but there's rarely any hint of children, and usually not much about work or age. My Little Pony has a nice wholesome approach to friendship, but I don't get much sense of the necessity for judgment and for solitude, or that everything doesn't always end gleefully. Or that there can be plenty of good in less-than-deep friendships. The goth scene seems to focus on loss and pain, but the last time I checked sunrises and Fourier transform could be beautiful no matter which side of the bed I got up on.
Who cares? Everybody knows that romance is only a part of marriage, that friends are sometimes hard to find, and that life is worth living.
Except that what we immerse ourselves in effects us, and if unbalanced will leave us off balance too. If I cannot find deep friendships at work or school even after a few years, should I blame them or me or just call it the luck of the draw? MLP characters can find them in 25 minutes. I've heard people seriously suggesting terraforming Venus and using inertial damping. I'm tolerably sure they hadn't been overindulging in Bill Nye episodes. And plenty of other people have noticed the effects of excessive romantic expectations on the length of marriages.
So how do we defend against imbalance? That's easier in politics than this sort of thing, since we generally don't notice the culture we swim in, while there are political partisans eager to enlighten you. I haven't noticed any striking benefit from multiculturalism in this regard. Maybe there's a PC filter, or maybe we just don't empathize easily. Or both. It isn't always easy to see what's in front of you. It is possible to write a couple of books about the joy of sex and not report on the glaringly obvious--like reporting about the hotels along the Grand Canyon and never mentioning the feature in the landscape nearby.
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