Why not be full of shit, everyone else is?

These are all coming to me as I watch the second of the new star wars movies.  If yoda can stop lightinging and he can hold up a bunch of heavy shit with his mind, why can't he just keep dooku's ship from flying away after they fight?  In that battle scene there were a few pretty hot jedi chicks, so If a jedi girl is out trying to pick up a dude does she go by "size matters not" or "that is a nice lightsaber you have constructed"?  Why doesn't Anakin have skin on his robo-hand at the end; I mean Luke had a store bought hand that came with skin in the Empire Strikes back?  Is Anakin that into arts and crafts that he insisted on building his own, or why doesn't he cover it with a glove? Wouldn't Padme say something, look at what she wears day to day?

Worrying about that right now is amazingly selfish.

Something I am really curious about is this: If you are a homeless person starving and looking for a place to sleep begging for a dollar and someone walks past you text message donating to haiti do you get pissed and say "what the fuck, standard text and messaging rates don't apply to me, give just give me a dollar", or do they say, "wow it's really remarkable the way people have unified to to help those in trouble"?  If it were me I'd probably be thinking the first one.  Besides, the living conditions in Haiti have been terrible for decades and nobody cared up until now.  I guess it's cooler to help those in need when you can brag about it i.e. "I text messaged my donation over my iphone" as opposed to "I gave a handful of change to a dude begging on the side of the road".  For the first one your peers will tell you how cool you are for taking advantage of technology to help in disaster relief (despite not having any real idea of how the money is being used), but for the second your peers will tell you how you are a sucker while assuming that the person is just going to use the money on crack or meth.  I'm not innocent, actually I'm a selfish asshole; I pay for cable and just bought a new phone, that's all money I could be donating to a local shelter of disaster relief.

To bring this all back to the realm of pop culture, it's like the Joker's speech at the end of The Dark Knight.  Something along the line of "nobody cares if a soldier or a gang-banger dies, it's all part of the natural order; but if someone threatens to blow up a boat everybody just goes crazy".  I don't have the quote right, but I think the point is clear.  It's like these people are fair-weather fans to the team of charity.

As I have been writing I have been trying to figure out how to make the star wars stuff fit in with the second half of this post; I think I figured it out.  The reason that it is important for us to be extra critical of the movies and art we are exposed to, especially the stuff that kids are seeing is that hopefully they will follow our example and question the stuff that is shoved in their faces.  Once people stop questioning the world in front of them the children learning from their example won't learn the importance of skepticism. I thought the first and second parts of this essay out before I wrote them, this part I'm just winging it so I apologize for the shitty quality of the writing.