D is for Drama...and Dumbass

Facts are often more boring than fiction. Stranger perhaps, but muddled with extra details that cut down the drama so many people seem to love. And sadly, when they are more exciting they are often unpleasantly real- Full of screaming, crying, and real people suffering real messy fates. After all, far be it from me to suggest Katrina wasn't exciting...it just sucked for pretty much everyone stuck in the middle of it. But generally, what really happened is a fairly mundane and explainable occurence. If your spouse is late coming home, she's probably not dead in ditch, the train was probably delayed. If a kid at school is moody and dark, he's probably going through a phase and not planning to shoot everyone in the school. Sure, these things happen...but they are rare and as I noted earlier, messy and sucky.

But that doesn't stop a lot of people from overreacting and overacting whenever they can use something mundane to throw a bit of drama into their lives. Because people as a rule, love drama.

However, most people don't love horror.* Yet instead of wanting to just be happy when your life is not full of horror, it seems that a lot of folks love to spice up their existence with drama. Drama, as I'm using it here, is creating or focusing on things which one can exaggerate, blow out of proportion, or overstate to create a bit of safe, unthreatening excitement.

So to give an example: A dead child is horror. Trying to kick goth kids out of school because they write some dark poetry and you're afraid they are going to kill your precious baby is drama.

Now, I won't pull any punches. I think that creating drama for yourself(or others) is unbelievably stupid and I do in fact think less of people who do it a lot. It's a cheap thrill at the price of actually not perceiving reality. It's what people who have various mental conditions want to stop from happening, and yet most perfectly stable folks seem to want to do this kind of crap for fun.

And I'm not talking about your garden variety drama queen here, I'm talking about otherwise normal people too. For example, let's say Guy A says to Guy B "I have a friend who's queer." Guy C overhears this and decides, since he doesn't like the word queer and thinks it's homophobic, that Guy A is a homophobe. He then either gets in Guy A's face about it or tell other people, who are either going to argue with with or agree with him. If they agree then a bunch of people think Guy A is a jerk, if not then maybe Guy C gets pissed and says some of these other folks are homophobes too. In either case, Drama has been created.

Problem is, there is a noteable subset of the GLBT community that like the word queer. They use it and ask people they know to use it instead of other terms. Guy A might be a jerk, or he might just be someone whose friend told him it was cool to call him queer. Until we ask, we don't know.

But most people don't bother asking. In fact, I think they don't want to. Because knowledge creates understanding. Understanding reduces drama, and drama is what so many people want they are willing to forgo a lot of other stuff, like sensible inquiry and needless animosity.

Also, asking is effort. A trivial one for most people I know, but an effort all the same. So creating drama is also often lazy. Especially since so much drama is reactive or gossip, and not stuff that people actually need to do something about.

So to recap- creating unnecessary drama is lazy, willfully ignorant, stupid, and maybe crazy.

So folks, consider this a PSA:

Don't be Dumbass...Don't Do Drama.

*And I mean real horror not Saw, which inexplicably a lot of people seem to love.