How convenient that I recently finished reading “Stupid White Men.” Bowling for Columbine was on telly yesterday so I just had to watch it again whilst getting on with not doing my work. It gripped me the first time I saw it and watching it again, it still has the same effect on me. To sum it up in one word, I’d have to say “enlightening,” but this covers up the fact that I kinda felt mentally raped like the first time I saw Fight Club. But Fight Club was fiction. This was real, supposedly, and it was so out there in parts that I couldn’t believe I was watching a documentary. Some of the stuff had to be lies, surely! Sure enough, upon hitting my web browser, I found pages with allegations that Moore was lying through his pearly whites. No doubt he caught wind of those and set up a page of rebuttals. I think people are at their best when they’re happy, but I do love it when Moore gets angry and goes on a mission.

It makes me wonder once again about truth and fear. Truth is divine but how often do we take a person’s word for something? The answer is “often and everyday.” People are just as reliable as newspapers. After all, most of what we know is derived from what we have read and heard from others (no wonder we have Urban Myths). Amongst the craziest things I have read in newspapers was a few months ago about an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Due to arrive in 2014, this almighty rock would have enough energy to knock our world into catastrophic turmoil and although astronomers reported that it ranked as being extremely unlikely to hit the Earth, the newspapers suggested that the researchers played down its chances and blew the story out of proportion. After publishing a diabolical version of this story, nearly all of the newspapers (at least in the UK) failed to retract the story! Imagine the panic that would ensue if such a threat was reported to occur soon, like next year? We’d have anarchy everywhere as society dissolves to the heat of a million fires. For this very reason, it can be safely assumed that if the world was ever going to end at the hands of some asteroid, we’d all be the last to know about it. It would hit us all whilst the important people of the world were hiding away in their secret underground bunkers. Would it be wise to let everyone know this crucial piece of information? Personally, I’d rather not know such things if it had to reach me through the public domain. It’s safer as a whole to just be unaware and live the way of the carpe diem.

I’ve always been fascinated in how the media can influence the majority. One of the best examples was definitely the Y2K fiasco where people were certain that upon hitting midnight in the year 2000, computer systems would crash, knocking out important systems such as air traffic control and the power grid. Moore showed footage in Bowling for Columbine of the frenzied consumers stocking up on tinned food and other survival necessities as 2000 drew near. I’m not sure how many people reading this actually went out and took any precautions, but my family and I just continued like it was another day on planet Earth.

I think it’s safe to say that the majority is governed and ruled by fear. All it takes is a little fear for us to reach into our pockets, whether it be fear of death, disease or just the fear of not fitting in. Remember the sale of gas masks and heavy duty tape reaching an all time high following the press of September the 11th’s atrocities? Inject fear into any equation and you’ll shift the decimal point of consumption to the right a few places. That’s the formula the media controls us with and I think Marilyn Manson said it best in the interview with Moore:

Moore: Do you know that on the day of the Columbine massacre, the U.S. dropped more bombs on Kosovo than any other day?
Manson: I do know that, and I think that’s really ironic, that nobody said “well maybe the President had an influence on this violent behavior” because that’s not the way the media wants to take it and spin it and turn it into fear, because then you’re watching television, you’re watching the news, you’re being pumped full of fear, there’s floods, there’s AIDS, there’s murder, cut to commercial, buy the Acura, buy the Colgate, if you have bad breath they’re not going to talk to you, if you have pimples, the girl’s not going to fuck you, and it’s just this campaign of fear, and consumption, and that’s what I think it’s all based on, the whole idea of “keep everyone afraid, and they’ll consume.”

I know that the newspapers lie to us a lot and embellish their stories. I know that Nicholas from my high school drama class lied frequently about his conquests with the opposite sex, but I don’t know if Moore was lying or not. He does ask important questions though and the truth would be nice but that is never ultimately guaranteed now, is it? One of the daftest acts you could do is to believe what anyone says all of the time, especially those you don’t know personally and/or intimately. So with Moore’s “documentary” I won’t take everything he says to heart, because at the end of the day he’ll have his own beliefs and issues just like the rest of us. The best thing one can do is to be open-minded. We all know there is some truth out there and because of this, we’ll want to believe in some of the things we read and hear. We can’t avoid thinking this way because it’s human nature. We as humans desire to discover the truth, so the best thing is to listen to all sides of the story and then run it through our own personal filters to ultimately decide what we do and don’t believe and why. Hey, it worked when we were around eight and was told that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy didn’t exist.