I have a bone to pick with modern society (big surprise).
What the hell happened to television? Disney channel is now featuring music videos with scantily-clad young teens, and the cartoons have been replaced with modern day sitcoms designed to appeal to a younger set. Reality "game shows" have given way to programs that idolize the young, "beautiful," and rich. Take "Keeping Up with the Kardashians." They have an 11- year old girl that looks about 16, who dresses like her older siblings and wears heavy make-up - of course her father disapproved, but can you really take him seriously since he's had a freaking face-lift?! Basically, TV has turned into programs that are designed to make the common U.S. citizen feel inadequate, while promoting consumerism to make up for that "inadequacy."So essentially you have consumerism disguised as entertainment coupled with the consumerism everyone recognizes, long commercial breaks. What I want to know is, why do Americans enjoy watching celebrity drama? It's so incredibly myopic! Modern television in an age of global climate change, political unrest, economic instability.

This absolutely worthless bullshit amid major red flags about the state of the planet, as documented by scientists around the globe contributing to the IUCN Red List, with the latest headline being "Species' Extinction Threat Grows," and reporting that,

"Out of the 47,677 species in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 17,291 were deemed to be at serious risk.

These included 21% of all known mammals, 30% of amphibians, 70% of plants and 35% of invertebrates."

What are our values? Clearly, much of modern television reflects what Americans truly care about. Obviously, the Kardashians couldn't care less about the world outside their materialistic, sheltered, money-padded palace.

At what point, being this disconnected from what is truly happening to the natural ecosystems around us, will we band together to change the course of history? Will it be too late - will humans, in their ignorance, cause the greatest extinction the Earth has ever seen? And will we be able to survive once these ecosystems that actually support us have completely collapsed? Perhaps we'll just move to another planet once we've destroyed this one.