COLLECTED STUPIDITY - CIVILISATION, ARE WE REALLY CIVILISED?… By ROBBIE TANSEL I don’t know if you’ve noticed but people these days are often a bit unusual. I put this down to something else you might not have noticed has happened: the world has changed. Did you notice that? One thing that brought about this revelation on my behalf was something I recently noticed on the social media called the Cheese Challenge. It’s one of those viral fads that I always wish would not take off. What happens with the Cheese Challenge is that people get a slice of cheese and then film themselves throwing the slice of cheese onto a baby’s face where hopefully it sticks
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and something entertaining happens. Obviously you don’t just film this stupid behaviour; you then post it to your favourite social media format. I said a baby, but I’ll give them a tiny benefit of the doubt by presuming they’re only doing it to their own baby, not just a random baby encountered while at the shopping centre. Variations on the Cheese Challenge also feature dogs, older children, unsuspecting College students and other adults copping a piece of cheese in the face. They don’t even ask the recipient if they’re lactose intolerant. This is how perfectly “normal” adults now fill their time. You could call it a hobby. While we’re talking specifically about the Cheese Challenge here, I think you can add any number of recent stupid fads that spread virally due to the internet. Planking. Dance fads like
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hour and a half to get the Commodore 64 game, safely stored on a tape, to load up. Every time you died or failed in the game, you had to go all the way back to the start. It wasn’t worth the trouble, everything was pixelly anyway, so you went outside and climbed a tree. In 1985 I collected footy cards… which came with a stick of chewing gum. The young people today collect photos of their classmates without their clothes on…which comes with the threat of a criminal conviction and having their name added to the sex offenders register. While we’re talking about pornography, in 2019 the youngsters have access to millions of full HD movies at their fingertips. They can filter for what exactly is going to tickle their fancy this day. A particular position? Do they have a favourite adult movie performer? Threesomes? Big girls? Old girls? You name it, you’ll be able to find it. So I’ve been told. Obviously if anything shows up on my internet browsing history at the moment it is only because I looked at it as research for this article. In 1985 your best hope for raunchy pictures of women was probably that your dad had a calendar from one of
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2. Do you sometimes miss key words in a sentence, or frequently need to ask people to repeat themselves? 3. When you are in a group, or in a crowded restaurant, is it difficult for you to follow the conversation? 4. When you are together with other people, does background noise bother you? 5. Do you need to turn up the volume on your TV or radio? 6. Has someone close to you mentioned that you might have a problem with your hearing?
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flossing. Dabbing. This is what adult hobbies look like in the year 2019. In the year 1985 my dad’s hobbies were reading the paper, mowing the lawn (religiously every weekend), washing the car (also done every weekend including full detailing), and drinking a couple of quiet stubbies in the shed. He might have thrown us kids in the car and taken us to enjoy the second half of the footy at West if we were lucky. Mum’s hobbies were various craft activities, baking cakes and biscuits (from scratch) and petty theft (or does that count as her career? I think she did it primarily for the fun rather than to make money, to be honest.) I’m not at all convinced that bringing children up in a world where we throw cheese in their face for our entertainment is going to lead to good outcomes. I don’t want to be one of those people who waffle on about how things were better in the good old days, but I do think it’s worth discussing what sort of a world we’ve created for young people today. A typical day in 1985 involved a lot of riding your bike. People did it for fun, not as a method of transport. Other fun activities were to undertake some sort of mass sporting activity with the rest of the neighbourhood kids, be it footy, cricket or some other option (actually I’m not sure that there even were any other sports in 1985). Another fun thing to do was to nag your mum for fifty cents, ride your bike to the deli and get a massive bag of lollies. Back then, for fifty cents, you got at least fifty lollies, not five like now. A typical day for a young person today is several hours in front of a gaming option of some kind. Often it will be something graphic, violent and scarily lifelike. In 1985, it took about an
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MOUNT GAMBIER MARKETPLACE HOSTING WORLD’S GREATEST SHAVE FUNDRAISER Mount Gambier Marketplace is hosting a World’s Greatest Shave event at Hairhouse Warehouse this Saturday from 2-4pm. Sixteen year old student Bianca (pictured), who works at Donut King, is headlining the event. “I’m taking part in the World’s Greatest Shave for the Leukemia Foundation because I’m on a mission to shave the world from blood cancer,” Bianca said. “I think I’m a very caring person and it’s very sad for me to think about all the innocent young kids going through such a tough time in their young life. It’s not a big thing to do, but I hope I can raise enough money to make a difference in somebody’s battle so donate today.” But Bianca doesn’t have to do this alone with the wonderful staff from Hairhouse Warehouse also donating their time to shave heads for $20 and apply colour spray for $10, for those who would like to participate, with proceeds going to The World’s Greatest Shave. lifestyle1.net | 26
the local tradies hanging in his shed of women either in bathers, or if you were really lucky a couple of them may have been topless. That means the pornography you had access to was 12 pictures per year. They weren’t being twisted up into some sort of a sex-knot or in the middle of the Alabama Hotpot. They were on a beach somewhere feeling guilty about what their parents would think of them. Try and tell me that all the porn that youngsters are watching today won’t have an impact on their idea of what a relationship should look like in years to come. Studies show that around ninety percent of pornography includes violence against women. Have you noticed that quite regularly these days we hear about women suffering from domestic violence or even being murdered by men? Gee I wonder if there is any link between those things? I’m just not convinced that we understand what the civil part of civilisation actually means. I’m not sure what the deal is with me being all socially conscious two weeks in a row. It’s like I’m writing letters to the editor. If you’d like to tell me about the good old days, email me at robbietansel@gmail.com