WW2 helped pull America out of the Great Depression by increasing labor needs exponentially, especially in manufacturing. When the war was over, the government didn’t want to erase all the jobs it had created, as well as wanting to keep the Soviet Union in check, so it permanized the military and created the military industrial complex. Continually pouring money into science research and military developments had many positive benefits such as a national highway system, the development of the transitor, and the creation of the mp3 audio format. However, this was also setting up America to fail. The Soviets weren’t able to keep competing with us and the Soviet Union ended up bankrupt and split up. However, once the Soviet Block was dissolved, we still continued to build-up our military. Was the fall of the Soviets not warning enough that something similar would soon happen to us? This great excess in spending, while resulting in many scientific innovations, also began to land our country in more and more debt. One has to wonder if our Congress would still be arguing ineffectively every few months about having to raise the debt ceiling if the military industrial complex was dissolved after the Soviet Union fell. Many would claim we needed our huge standing military in order to conduct the ‘War on Terror’ several years later, but if we hadn’t already been so prepared to go to war, would that have happened in the first place? It is widely accepted now that we rushed into wars in the middle east because of the emotional outrage over 9/11 and faulty information provided by the Bush administration, but if we instead had needed months and months to prepare for war, we may have been able to stop it and therefore save millions of lives that didn’t need to wasted.

As a realist, I don’t believe in perfection. The pursuit for perfection is what leads us to be great but that’s all it is. A pursuit. We can never reach perfection, as the world is constantly changing and evolving. What was considered perfection 30 years ago is now considered dated and imperfect. Perfection is a human invention. Things are the way they are, but things can always be better. The idea of perfection comes from religion, that we are just imperfect copies of the divine ideal. However, once one realizes that there is no divine ideal, or even a divine, we can accept that we should work towards ‘perfection’ in order to benefit the human race, not to reach some god-given ideal.

I read a lot as a kid. Just saying that seems like an understatement though. As a shy kid who spent most of his time alone, I devoured books on the daily. I would read until the wee hours of the morning just to find out what happened to my favorite characters. I would read to myself for hours and hours, creating pictures to go along with the words in my mind. I often talked to myself and to this day still do while performing mind-numbing tasks.As a result of this, I have a highly developed divided self. The self I project to others is differentiated from the self inside my head. Because of this there is often a disconnect between me agreeing to do something and then actually following through with it. The self that agreed to work at subway is not the same self that is mopping the entire restaurant and then scrubbing the bathroom at 11pm on a school night. While this causes slight resentment for myself for the choices I’ve made, it also allows me to be self-analytical which helps me grow as a person.

Growing up in the digital age, I have listened to the majority of my music on my ipod with headphones in. Early on I noticed that songs I had transferred from old CDs seemed considerably quieter and I often turn them up to match the loudness level of the modern music I listen to. Not only can this lead to damaging the inner ear, but you also lose a considerable amount of the feel of the music when it’s constrained so. While having equally-loud music is handy when I’m cutting the grass and the lawnmower drowns out the softer parts of the song, in regular settings it diminishes the feel and vibe of the music.

Since most popular music is released by major record companies (which in the past few years have been consolidating more and more, buying out smaller labels with a few key artists) they aim it towards radio, which relies upon the first impression of a song to market it to consumers. Not only does maximizing the loudness level make certain songs pop more on the radio, but eliminating the quieter bits makes it less likely that someone in our instant-gratification culture will change the radio station when they get bored. To add to this, radio stations compress the audio further than even the record companies do, making all the sound levels virtually identical. This may be a leading reason in why all popular music is starting to sound more and more of just one song on repeat. Instead of pushing forward new ideas about song structure and how hooks and melodies should intertwine, the industry is supporting a flatline effect in which musicians and their labels seek to imitate what is currently popular and playing on the radio, which in turn just escalates the loudness war even more.