paranoid android...

while stuffing our faces with chili the other night, the conversation between my father, stepmother and i turned to generational differences... i brought up the fact that i believe their generation (the baby-boomers, the cats of the '50s, etc.) are a bunch of paranoid fear-mongers... the men and women of their age range have this definite need to scare themselves out of living life with a slight sense of uninhibited play... they fear commercials, deem them controversial and ban them off television; they fear their youth; and the big one, they fear that anything and everything is a source of terrorism in its most cruel incarnation...

last week, a pair of hippie-spirited men were hired to place lite-brite type panels on buildings and overpasses throughout boston... the image created on them was the likeness of a character from the adult cartoon program, aqua teen hunger force... this character was flipping the bird -- the plan was for this to be a humourous guerrilla marketing campaign, targeted at followers of the comedic animated show... unfortunately the boston police didn't find it so funny... at all... a bomb threat was called in and terrorist activity was assumed... long story short, the two men were taken into custody for what was deemed to be a threatening "hoax"...

are we really starting to believe that just about anything that seems remotely out of context in our environment is the work of terrorists? would a cartoon character flipping the bird on a lite-brite really be their course of action? and would they place said displays in perfect view of all commuters just for shits and giggles?

my father denounced my stance, claiming that my generation takes things too lightly... shame on us for throwing caution into the wind...?