Stepping On and Stepped On

This morning, spawned from an idea for a performance piece that I won't do until I have the courage to display myself as such, my mind is settled upon the idea of this morbid and somewhat stupid thought.

It seems that more and more often, I'm witnessing how many time people get offended by certain things. Little things like laughing at violence in a movie where that subject is a serious matter. Big things like how a politician said this about this subject that causes this group of people to get pissed off. Stupid things like supplying negative feedback only to be seen as bitching rather than helping due to the displaying of your own ignorance through the negative feedback, however well constructive it may be. Even things that shouldn't even piss people off but do like theme park attractions and cartoons.

There is always something that offends someone that causes some kind of action. Verbal, physical, psychological, and even visual offences cause verbal, physical, psychological, and other forms of action that end up offending other people continuing the circle.

It's strange, because in the course of these, someone somewhere always says "I wish they would just die." Some even go so far as to try and kill the offender. But what does that cause but nothing more but even more offence? Immediate satisfaction leads to more problems, as what may be good for you is not good for everyone else around you. Conversely, what's good for the people around you may not be good for you, and so what then? What do you do in that situation?

There's a message board game I started on Gaia several months back called "What if." In it, we ask mostly stupid questions along the lines of what if this happened. The next person must answer it before asking another 'what if' to keep the game going. Two posts (a question and an answer) didn't make me chuckle or at least think of how stupid the two where. The question was What if the world was one nation? The answer? We'd be in a constant state of civil war.

It makes sense to me. Nobody can agree on anything; we all must compromise. Even then, our compromises cause so many other offenses directly or indirectly. The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy offends the gay community because it is implying that the armed forces and even the country they serve don't want to protect homosexuals. Civil Right groups are probably just as upset as you and me that the KKK is still allowed to hold meetings and scout new members. What I write here pisses off a few people because they may read this as angsty writing from someone with the mental age of a teenager.

And to think, somewhere someone is foolishly wanting world peace. There's no way we can get that, and some of us know it. The world will always been at odds with itself. The environmentalists will always be against those that construct and pollute, who in turn will be against those that are pressing against them to stop giving jobs to foreign countries, who in turn are pissed because of the foreign influence coming in and destroying their tradition, which in turn is seen as pagan because it doesn't worship the same god as this religion over here. And so on and so on and so on.

Why can't we just leave people alone? Why do we, as social creatures, insist on making everything my way or the highway? Even when we don't, why do we try to come up with something that fails in the design to please everyone involved in the ordeal?

We offend each other because we can't find that balance. We probably don't even know what it is we need to balance, which may be beyond the obvious.

The only thing positive right now is that peace and compromise of any kind on any level, global or personal, cannot be achieved if with every new developing generation there is a fresh bed made for growing offences. That's why I'm offended when I see protesters taking their children to demonstrations when the child has no idea why their parents are protesting.