“Offensive” KFC Ads
I'm tired of seeing these kinds of things, something needs to be said.
Here's a post from Mashable, with a completely subjective title reporting a KFC ad from Australia on YouTube which is offending some people. My thoughts: you're all idiots. Otherwise? See for yourself: Is This KFC Ad Racist? [VIDEO].
Look. People. I know there are still some in this country who haven't gained any kind of respect for humanity or considered a perspective from someone other than themselves, despite everything the country's gone through over the past half-century. Maybe there are still hard feelings. Maybe it's just another bad case of ignorance. But this is the time-- to get over yourselves. Whether you know this or not, every time you get offended by something, someone else gets power over you. If equality is what you're looking for, stop getting so offended. A word is a word. A stereotype is a stereotype. You are the ones who are giving it meaning, and a negative one at that.
They bring up how a poll was conducted, 27 percent say the ad is racist, 69 say it isn't, blah blah. Yeah, no shit. There will always be people who are so stuck on a negative idea that they could find spaghetti offensive. Business will never win in this field because they have to please the masses. Tough luck to KFC.
The point is what this means to the individual. Half of the women-friends I have don't get offended by the word "cunt." It's a word used regularly in daily conversation and exchanged both ways, in fact. But I also have friends so drawn back by the word that they'll smack me before I can finish the fourth letter. It's a mixed bag and always will be. But you give a word, stereotype, or idea its power by getting offended. Solution? Don't.
Fate
There are a few words in the English language that are used to over-simplify one huge idea when there is a lot more to it. One of these words that many people are probably familiar with is love. Some that might not be so obviously are fate and luck. But I'll get to luck another day.
Like all of these "one word-ers," you might believe in them, or you might not. Another characteristic that they all seem to share is their inability to be unquestionably proved or disproved.
Our topic today, fate, can't really be proved or disproved because no one knows for sure what will happen in the future, or what would've happened if you had made a different choice (or what choice you should make ahead of time, for that matter). Now we sometimes like to think we know that "we should've done this" or "seen this coming." The psychology-types call this hindsight-bias. But there is a big difference between what we think we know about what would've happened and what actually would've happened.
I try not to directly state my beliefs here but I will this time. I believe we all have a fate, but it needs to be better defined. I believe we have a whole sequence of actions and decisions that we will make in our lifetime, based on our environmental factors and state of mind at the time of those decisions, when they happen in the future. In other words, you have complete free-will; but the decisions you make because of your free will have already been made in the timeline of your life. Which goes to say, it is not "fate" in the way your family, or society, or others see it. Your fate is strictly created in your own mind, based on the environmental factors around you (friends, family, society, etc.) when you make any decision. The succession of all these decisions you will make in life are stacked up in the even bigger timeline that is time itself. But if you were to draw a picture of your life based on fate, it would be a crooked, zig-zagging line, changing direction at every decision (as opposed to a straight, unchanging line). The common misconception seems to be that we don't make our own decisions in our life. When, in fact, we make every decision based on all the factors in our own head at the time. And that is what determines where our life leads-- our "fate."
Next week I'll go a little more in-depth on this topic in Part 2.
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