Interesting point our pastor made: how a major annual fundraising concert held here, in which local celebrities attempt increasingly death-defying stunts every year, is comparable to the gladiator games held in ancient Rome -- the bloodier and gorier, the better. Why do we get such a kick out of watching someone put their lives in danger?

Our people's hunger for excitement gets increasingly harder to sate, and the organisers try their best each year to play to their audience. It's as if our "thrill-meters" are getting numb, requiring higher levels of excitement to stimulate us, kind of like how a person can get accustomed to sleeping pills or painkillers, and need higher doses to get the same effect.

It's disturbing how many "prime-time" TV shows nowadays are about murder investigations, competing with one another to show ever more graphic and explicit crime scenes. And trailers for these shows come on the middle of a children's cartoon! (And these very children are saving their pocket money to buy better computer gaming equipment, so they can see their opponents bleed and explode into little bits when they shoot them. -- I feel kinda naive now, thinking how I used to be perfectly well-entertained trying to get a frog across a busy highway.)

But this is what people want to see, so this is what people get.

It made me think of something that has troubled me for a long time -- that we are a bread-and-circuses society. "Bread and circuses" were what Roman satirist Juvenal in the first century lamented as being all that Romans wanted:

...Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses...(Juvenal, Satire 10.77-81)

How does one subjugate an entire nation? Keep the people well-fed and entertained. Actually, even as I write that, I realise that it's more than just the nation. It's the whole world. Give us reality TV, and action movies with as much violence in them as possible, and pizza delivery, and we'll just live quietly in our homes and never come out to complain about the state of the world we're living in.

Two links:
Wikipedia Bread and Circuses page
I don't agree with everything this guys says, but he makes some good points.