I woke up this morning and had some cereal for breakfast. It was sort of a granola/raisin bran meld and it tastes really good. After breakfast I played Just Cause for a little bit. I was going to cut the grass, but it was still wet from the rain yesterday, so I figured playing video games would be equally productive. I had an early lunch, then showered and did a little bit of packing. I'm sure that this weekend is going to be awesome... lots of packing. Oh joy.
After lunch I went to George House with Kelley. That was fun. We caught up on life, traded college stories, the usual. She just finished two months of shadowing in a hospital... so she had lots of interesting stories to share. I don't regret that I will be spending the rest of my life behind a desk, and whenever I talk to someone in some area of the medical field I am happier and happier to sit a desk forever.
I got into an argument with people on the internet today. Someone on a website that I frequent asked whether people should be allowed to post offensive material on the internet? I stated that illegal material should be treated as such, but legal material should not be punished even if I find it offensive. That's the "ugly side" of freedom of speech: as long as you remain in the constraints of the law, you are free to say whatever you like even if I disagree with you. My two main points were that 1: you should only get punished if you break the law (in which case you should get punished) and 2: you can't expect everyone to have the same moral standard that you do. Just because I find something offensive doesn't mean that you do. Now, the civil thing for me to do in such a situation is try my best to not offend people, but as long as I'm not breaking the law we are free to do whatever we want. You can't get in trouble if you're not breaking the law. Well... people didn't like that. They were saying "well, A is worse than B" and "this isn't a matter of legality, it's a moral issue! B isn't hurting anyone, but A is!" I did my best to explain that the whole mentality of "only things that hurt other people are wrong" is only one moral perspective and you can't assume that everyone uses that same perception. The law of the land is a moral code to which we must abide or suffer the consequences. Beyond the law, we are on our own to create whatever moral decisions we deem best. But we can't expect everyone to agree with us. People of varying religions should be using their religious texts as a basis for their morality. But atheists do not have such a higher entity to give them a moral code. Generally the hold the humanist perspective of "do no harm to others. All other things are permissible." Personally, I get the basis of my moral structure from the Bible. However, I understand that not everyone does. I do not expect everyone to hold to the same moral structure that I do. And that's ok. Our diversity makes us human. So I will never ask that someone agree with my moral structure. I will only ask that they be willing to engage in mutual respect for each of our views on morality. Even people of the same beliefs will have varying degrees of the same moral code. But how about we all do our best to not offend each other and just understand that we are all different, shall we?
So after all that business, I made pancakes for dinner. After mom and I cleaned up we went shopping for some school supplies for me. And food. I got new shoes! Woo!
After shopping we got back, put food away and then cleaned up the kitchen. Then I went over to Becky's to hang out with friends. After I went to Taco Bell... I was hungry. Miles brought his little sister and her friend. It was fun. After they went home I sat around and talked with Becky for a little bit about life and how she wants to do something more than work at JCPenney. She talked/thought about going back to school to be a teacher. I think she'd be good at that. I also recommended that she consider working at a day care because you don't need an education degree for that. We're both sad because summer is going to be over soon and we're going to have to be all responsible again. Which is silly. But alas. We go to school so we can get jobs so we can buy things that we can consume and possibly reinvest... so we can buy more things. But hey, it's the American Dream, right? Or something.
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