HW 35 - Cool Paper Rough Draft

Cool can be used as power to lead thinking, its not the ultimate in how we will be lead but someone in power understanding what is cool can help influence their thinking and decision making and overall presentation of themselves. What is being said is that cool is in the eye of the beholder but the powers that be have a good amount of influence on that. We may look at some Nike shoes as cool and others that aren’t for several reasons. They might not be “Fresh” or someone already has them. There are so many reasons as to why not but so few as to why something is cool. That’s a huge problem with our society; we always find hundreds of reasons why we shouldn’t do something but only a few as to why we shouldn’t. Maybe because we are lazy, maybe because we have a narrow field of vision, and maybe because we are heavily influenced by the people of power. All that being said that doesn’t necessarily a bad thing. If these people have the right ideas they can start us in the right directions and possibly push us to new heights but that is never what happens because as I stated before, people always find something wrong with the actions of others. Now it isn’t new information that people are difficult but the new question is, is it intentional for people to be the way they are and what kind of effect does cool have on this? I think that people are collages of the people around them. They never loose the ideas of what used to be cool; they just build on it with more information from other sources.

People as a whole can be difficult but they usually have the intentions of being good but being so easily influenced, those intentions can easily be skewed. They look out for other people but the need to be cool can make them over look the need to support their fellow humans. It all links back to the need to save face and how every human is looking to save their own face. Their face being their masculinity/femininity, their dignity, their reputation and everything that makes them stand above other people. They want to be able to save their own face and then save others because everyone is looking out for number one and that would be themselves. The way cool affects this is because cool runs this whole operation. It is not a relatively new phenomenon though. In Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, the main character Macbeth kills the king to whom he swore allegiance so that way he would have power and riches and henceforth be “cool.” It isn’t that different now. We are just as quick to turn on each other for that shot at being cool. Not every single person is object to this rule but a greater percentage is. And whether or not they would attest to it, they are. People like to give themselves credit by saying that they do care about people. But if the building was on fire then a greater number of people would dash for the door then try to help anyone who may be hurt or in trouble. No person is actually completely bad or evil; they do have the ability to show compassion, which is what makes us human. Communication helps but the willingness to help a lesser person is what make us different from the animals.

Is compassion cool? Does it really matter? I have come to realize that judging if something is worth caring about or not is just another way of trying to be cool. There is no way for there to be something that is completely cool because there is not very much that the majority of society agrees on. We all might have similar ideas and thoughts but they are all individual to us. Just like our haircuts or out personalities. The idea of trying to be an individual is total and complete bull s&*t because we are all pretty different from each other. The only problem is that people look over the little things because they are too busy judging a book by its cover. If they got close to them then maybe they would realize that they were cool but the problem is that takes a lot of effort and as stated before, people are lazy. It takes too much effort to get close to someone and they don’t want to waste that kind of time and effort on a person because they don’t ever see them as “worth it.” After all, what has this person done for them? People are always looking for some kind of retrabution for the things they haven’t done, like the world owes them something. They think that by being an individual and buying the shoes that some billboard taught them to buy and by wearing big headphones that some music video taught them to buy, they should automatically be repaid in full by society for that, that by being here and doing that they have done something amazing. The only question is what makes peoples like this? Its because everyone acts like this and they are just doing what they were taught was cool. When we see a movie that portrays some person who doesn’t care and acts like the world doesn’t owe them anything, we are shocked because we aren’t used to seeing peoples like this because people like this are new to us. We aren’t used to it all. I can’t imagine that is a bad thing but I think that if we saw that more then we would all probably be better people. But seeing it once has a small impact in us. Enough to change us and add a little more to our collage of cool.