C for a Cause

Season 9 of Southpark. I was happily lounging off on my bed and smiling unconsciously to myself because I anticipated a flurry of humor to wash me away. I was watching Southpark, unhindered, after about a gap of 2 years. I remember seeing till season 7 while I was in college. But that's the story for another day.

The second episode of that season's called 'Die Hippie, Die'. It starts off with Cartman dresed up as a pest controller who speacialises in eradicating hippies, because 'all they do is smoke pot and smell bad'. Cartman had earlier encountered these 'vile' creatures and plans to rid the town clean of these abominations, as he fears Southpark will soon be infested by them hippies, who, as is their credo, start a jam band festival whenever they grow in numbers at a particular place. So much is the resolve of Cartman in the face of adversity, that he single handedly imprisons 63 hippies in his basement, keeping them satisfied with a regular tdose of joints, brownies and guitars.

Meanwhile, Kyle, Stan and Kenny encounter a group of 1st year students from the University of Colorado at Boulder, who tell them that they are being slaves to the corporations while they mooch off the hard labor of the common man for a pittance. Kyle, Stan and Kenny realize their folly and join the hippies, who, now having grown into a sizeable number, agree to start a jam band festival in Southpark to fight the corporations. Their reason: "We will show the corporations that we do not need them. We can live off ourselves". But somewhere down the line, the festival continues for 9 days and the young boys, previously disillusioned by the corporate mumbo-jumbo, come to the conclusion that they have achieved nothing in the past week but "got high and smoked crappy weed all the time". Subtle, but ironic.

Somehow, we've all been there. We've all believed in a cause, stood up for it, tried to make converts out of people who did not give a rat's ass about it anyway. We resolved not to give in to the shenanigans that dictated the life of the 'common man' as he was too influenced by the dictates of society. We wanted to be the social factors that altered community/human behavior as we considered ourselves a notch above our neighbors. All this while smoking pot oursleves, getting hammered out of what was left of our senses, and glorifying Pink Floyd as if they were the only British progresive band that ever walked the earth. We wanted to be above the ordinary, and then somehow we lost it all.

This is usually what humans do. And by humans, I mean myself too. I have done the very same things mentioned in the above paragraph. We join a moving wave, hoping to alter its course, but get carried away by the flow, land on an obscure beach somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and choose to stay there as its calm, serene, peaceful and away from the 'drags of life'. Unfortunately, these 'drags of life' are what give character to our existence. To try to change them is human intuition. Its also called evolution, to try to move on to something better. But when the 'moving on' becomes 'moving in a tangent', things go awry. And then we just don't care. It applies to hippies as much as it does to mothers who leave their children unattended to fend for themselves at 2 am at night. It applies as much to a politician trying to make things right as it does to the anarchist trying to rebel against that very same politician. It applies as much to the aspiring MBA candidate trying his heart out to get into a good B-School as it does to the NGO worker who teaches slum kids the basic alphabets.

It great to have a goal. It's even better to progress towards it. It'll be absolutely smashing if we actually make it to half of the way towards converting that dream into reality. We gotta try.

The cause never dies. Neither does the mind that carries and nurtures it. The latter just chooses to ignore it till it is beneficial for the host to take up the cause again. It's also called being an oppotunist bastard.