I spent a couple years working in London, more than a decade ago. And there were many blessings in my job and learning a new culture.
It was during that time that I developed what I call the “Fair Scale for Determining Cultural Degeneration.” A simple and politically incorrect scale it is:
The degeneration of any modern culture is demonstrated by the direct proportion of the society’s young people displaying excessive tattoos and body piercings.
At the time I was working in London, I spent about half my time in London and half in Chicago. Walking about each city (as I had to do going to various offices) I quickly perceived that the typical young person in London had nearly three times as many tattoos and body piercings as the young person in Chicago. (Yes, I have scientifically corrected the data to reflect the fact that young people in London at the time tended to reveal more of their physical selves in public than young people in Chicago. I also corrected for the higher number of people in London who appeared to have immigrated from a third-world place where tattoos were an ancient rite, along with various foreign objects stuck through various body parts.)
I had not thought about my future-famous scale until last week while sitting on a plane going from Atlanta to Chicago. Most of my fellow travelers were, well, a bit younger than I am. The young woman sitting beside me seemed pleasant enough and was reasonably dressed. But she had piercings in all of her visible sensory organs and appendages, along with a menagerie of tattoos running up and down her arms. A young woman across the aisle was similarly adorned.
As I glanced about the plane, I realized that most of the folks under the feared age of 30 were, well, pretty thoroughly inked. Most were wired beyond anything approaching “normal.” And, no, this wasn’t a charter flight to the national body art convention, assuming there must be some such event.
So…I think this is really strange and indicates that our society is fading fast from reality to something that isn’t quite right. We’ve caught up to where London was a decade ago – perhaps they are still a decade of degeneration ahead of us, although I fear to think what than must look like.
In Chicago, having a school of mackerel swimming up your legs or a bottle cap embedded in your ear lobe is getting to be “normal.” But it isn’t normal to me and it never will be. I’m willing to give patriotic folks a little flag or symbol to show their loyalty. Members of the various armed forces can justify an emblem. And women are entitled to a hole or two per ear lobe for earrings that are less than a quarter the size of the hula hoop.
But before you have a tattoo of Justin Bieber on your forehead or have a Mount Blanc fountain pen stuck through your eyebrow, kneel down, say a prayer and wait until the urge goes away.
