I'm unsure about this now. I think one lesson to be learned from bullfighting is that life brings many changes (death being one of them) and you have to deal with them all. Globalization is another change we all have to acknowledge. To deny it is simply closed thinking. It always hurts to lose some part of your identity but identity is something that is never stagnant. (See “If I were a building…”) You can fret about the things you've lost or you can revel in the beautiful change those losses bring about in you.
And what Irony! Soon bullfighting might die just as the bulls do.
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i don't know, ross. i think that's a great personal philosophy to take but it really does mean the loss of something extremely valuable. you could say the same thing about, say, climate change. philosophically, sure. nature is about change and we are part of nature, so we should accept global climate change as a natural process. maybe on the inside i think it's a good idea to adopt this way of thinking, if only to keep yourself from breaking. but even to be alive is to be fighting changes. to be fighting to survive--eating, breathing--is to fight change. to save somebody's life is to fight a change because you don't want to let them die. you can't just let sad things happen--and sad is a relative term, but being a human with a mind means that you decide for yourself what is good and what is bad and then you fight for what is good. and to me, loss of culture is a very sad thing.
yeah but EVENTUALLY everything has to change. thats all I ment to say, not that because everything has to die we should just end it all right now. thats not what I meant at all. I just mean people have to learn to deal with change. I would probably consider myself a cult con eventhough I know that at the core of it is nostalgia and a desire for something that has already past and will never return.
I like bullfights. I dont want them to end, Im just saying they might one day and, while that is very very sad, people will have to deal with it just like all the sad parts of life. in that way, cultural conservativism is a little is a bit closed and unrealistic. it's looking to the past.
saying 'bullfights will be around forever' is like saying 'ross voorhees will be around forever,' and while sometimes I might want that, its just false.
yeah, i understand what you're saying. pretending that changes aren't happening in your own culture and others is ignoring the truth. which these days often happens and creates something fake and often commercialized in the wake of what was once very meaningful. trying to keep something around just for the sake of that nostalgia is appropriation of a real culture that once existed and undermines what that something really once was. anyway,i agree that it's better to acknowledge change and try to incorporate change into building a newer version of a culture--a more adapted, globalized version, for example. somthing that's more flexible and more meaningful for the present instead of the past. cultures are not stagnant.
but on the other hand, i feel strongly that the only people who could possibly determine the use of their own ceremonies and such are the people from that culture. it's not for me to decide what spaniards should fight for. but you are there and you see the spaniards who want to keep it around and those who don't, so you have a pretty good understanding. i realize that my comment might have sounded superior, but i only meant to provoke a response because i liked the post, ross voorhees.
yeah, I think we pretty much agree! and i dont want to tell anyone what to do, especially not people from a different culture. im just exploring, thinking and taking notes! = )
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