Saturday, March 20, 2010

Complex issues in 2 minutes.


I shot the video above 2 years ago, along with a bunch of others. It's a short, maybe too short and too simplistic treatment of the mental/emotional component of being physically ill. I got a few comments on it from people who expected a lot more from a a 2 minute video. I also got some encouragement. Not many comments, but people still watch it a fair amount (compared to some of our other videos). So, maybe one day I'll re-do it longer and more completely. Maybe not. It's short, it's off the cuff, and the issue is one of the largest issues which human beings face.

"Why people get sick" probably should have been called "Some Contributing Factors to Illness". The basic premise being that sometimes people get sick because they need an undeniable excuse to avoid something in their lives. SOMETIMES, being the important word.

Granted, I'm pretty healthy most of the time. I go through long periods being perfectly fine, and then, once in while I get sick and seem to take a very long time to get over it. In my case there are usually some easily discernable psychological patterns there, personal stuff, that's how and why I do any video; to share from my personal experience, as far as that goes and only as far as that goes. Some youtube viewers get that, some get mad when their personal experience doesn't exactly match mine. Or they want to take my "Why PEOPLE get Sick" video and ask me why animals get sick. Not ask, really, but start an argument with me.

In 2 years we've had to learn to simply delete the malcontents, the trolls, essentially anybody who either lacks common sense or just has a chip on their shoulder for reasons which have nothing to do with me. Web 2.0 is not all that it's cracked up to be. Imagine if every TV broadcaster could hear what every viewer across the world yells at their television set. Do you think those "comments" would be worth publishing? That's what happens if you run unmoderated comments on youtube. Actually, it's worse than that: because one comment feeds another comment, and another and another. OK, enough about dogpiling trolls. It looks exactly the way that it sounds, and I'd have to say that it smells about the same way too.

Lately I was very dismayed to find that a video of an older white guy who gets in a fight with a younger black guy got about 1.5 million views in three days. It's still going of course, getting reposted everywhere. I had already come to grips with the fact that any teenage girl in a skimpy outfit doing anything would get far more views than all of our educational videos combined. Maybe that will change some day--- after all, our most popular video is about spontaneous Kundalini awakening and I figured that this would be the most obscure subject of any video that we've shot. Anyway, sex and violence: it's a draw and it's always been a big draw. Even Shakespeare knew how to use that to his advantage, and yet his plays also move in to the profound, some of the highest human concerns and callings. There must be a lesson in that. It's holistic, life includes it all. Don't expect to see Hamlet on youtube anytime soon though, you need to devote several solid hours to really take in the unedited play, and that's the way that it should be.

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