I was excited today to find a new issue of The Walrus in my mailbox when I got home for lunch. Like I normally do, I flipped quickly through it, reading the headlines and titles while I munched away on my sandwich. Nothing caught my eye enough to warrant reading right then and there, but one title did make be read it twice. It was “Has X Gone Too Far?” (It wasn’t really X, I just can’t remember what it was at the moment, and the web page hasn’t been updated yet.)

Understand that the content of this article held no particular interest to me, rather, I was interested in the title and topic. I try to read more and more these days, in the hopes I can stay informed and either support or dissolve my social and political beliefs. I’ve even tried to write a little, but realized quickly that I only wrote constructively when I had a topic I was passionate about, and that simply took too much of my time. When I see a title with “Gone Too Far” in it, I’m immediately biased to the negative side of the argument. This influences my opinion without even giving me content, and I don’t like that.

I’m sure it’s a fault of my own in some fashion. Some sort of failure on my part to “walk” into a well written article and be so easily influenced. Meh, so be it. It just seems to me that any hack author with a couple night classes under their belt can scrape the daily headlines for a topic and wrap “Has Gone Too Far” around it. In my lazy style, I will recite my Google findings:

Casual Day Has Gone Too Far
Has TV Gone Too Far?
Curriculum: Inclusion: Has It Gone Too Far?
Sex & music has it gone too far?
Has post-9/11 dragnet gone too far?
Why World War II nostalgia has gone too far..
Has Globalization Gone Too Far?
Has outsourcing gone too far?
…

1,600,000 English hits. Are all of these topics so far out of control that we need someone to step up and tell us? Are we truly too daft to figure it out for ourselves? My guess is neither of those statements are true. My guess is people have a need to write articles and get them published, which pays the bills and feeds their families. (Yes, yes, I know nothing of who these authors are, but no one pays me to write this, so go to The Hell). Maybe we can spend more time writing articles/essays about things that haven’t gone far enough, like World Peace efforts, Red Cross funding in non-emergency times (though those are few and far between these days), and putting the real crooks and criminals in jail. Has “Going Too Far Gone Too Far”? This non-reporter thinks so.