The Walking Dead 13

This morning I heard an interesting piece on the radio put together by some journalism students from one of our community colleges. The segment itself wasn't that interesting, but some of the issues around it might be. These were all young twenty-somethings acting out a little skit about how awful it is that none of them can get a date, much less a significant other in their lives. While enduring their dreadful wooden acting and their heterocentric thinking), I caught myself musing that if they are as visually unattractive as their voices, then is it any wonder that none of them is getting laid. Yes, I know, they are young, horny, emotionally needy and, likely as is the case for almost everyone younger than eighty, they seem to have a sense of entitlement about hooking up. But we have to face one rather unsettling fact of life. Darwin was right about natural selection. It is the most attractive and strong among us that get the partners and they are the most highly favoured to pass on their genes. Love and romance is not a fair playing field, never was and never will be. Sad, I know, but radical acceptance, eh? This also gives the lie to the current mentality that having sex is every bit as fundamental a human right as protection under the law (and sometimes from the law), or housing (Canada is still woefully behind on this one!). This can also be blamed on the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, when we went from the mindset that good girls always say no, to, good girls always say yes. And then a whole flood of horrors came flowing in: rape, sexual assault, objectification, and you name it. Now, we have the Me Too movement that has understandably chilled the fire for a lot of would be swains and lovers. Add to this the grudging acceptance that a lot of young people (notably hetero males) have to live with, that because the sexual revolution favoured men a lot more than women (so, what else is new?) They are just going to have to get used to being romantically paired with their right or left hand for the rest of their lives. Tech and social media should also bear at least some of the blame. People have become so used to mediating socially through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other apps, that they are rapidly losing the ability to interact positively with each other, face to face, as human beings. Add to this mix the long and incredibly grueling hours that a lot of people have to put in at school and work in order to keep body and soul together, and is it any wonder that the boys are left sitting at home looking at porn, and the girls are left to their Magic Wands? There are other forces at play, as well. We live in an environment thoroughly poisoned by consumer capitalism. This extends of course, to our courting and dating habits. Online dating is an especially sad symptom of this, where potential partners have to treat something that should be lovely, tender, and humorous and fun as something akin to the grueling and thankless labour of applying for a job, getting selected for an interview, then enduring the interview with a strong likelihood of rejection. Underlying this, of course, is this sad and chronic neediness. It isn't so much that they are looking for someone to love. They want to be loved, and I don't think that a lot of them really have much of a capacity for giving as good as they get. I hope I'm wrong. But when some of the most intimate human interactions are reduced to something so banal, so crass and consumerist, then I really wonder, and shudder, to think of where all this could be heading. Sad it is that with so many worthier causes to present on public radio, those young journalism students have decided to stick to bottom-feeding. I really do hope that they are not representative of the face of the future of journalism, Gentle Reader.