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So here I am, freshly showered, hair slicked back(!), and burning the shit out of my mouth on a freshly nuked mouthful of Hamburger Helper. I could not have picked a better time to start a blog if there were a gun to my head and an eternity to think. As irony would have it, I actually had a gun to my head earlier today. Not. But I did spend all day staring blankly at a cubicle wall while trying to figure out what the fuck Lionel Rothkrug meant by the phrase "upward displacement of sanctity". Whatever, his name was Lionel, he couldn't have been that smart or that cool.

But he wrote some pretty interesting shit about the impact that a society's method of commemorating and ritualizing death has on other areas of society. I'll keep this short and quick, as I'm on my last corn muffin and I have another paper to write. In short, he claims that the sense of distrust for our fellow man that is pervasive throughout American society has foundations in the way we treat or, more appropriately, mistreat our dead. Everyone knows or knows of someone that has died. How many times have you talked about their death? Not about their life, but about their death? Not many? Not at all? Why not? It's probably because we are programmed to view our dead as an entity that no longer exists in any shape or form. We, as a society, feel no obligation to them. No sort of legacy that we, as a society, must "live up to" or "carry on". Because of this, we, as a society, have no real common ground. We have nothing to relate to each other with. We, as a society, have no real common bonds. This is why we feel so alone. It's "individualism". It's the AMERICAN WAY!