This morning I bought food from the grocery store. We all need food to survive as well as water. At the end of the month I have to pay for rent and utilities. Those things are necessary for us to survive. We need shelter and in our modern age we need utilities to make our lives a little comfortable. I have car payments to make. While it could be said I need a car, if I lost my car tomorrow I could still live. I could take public transportation or walk to places. Believe me, when I didn’t have a car almost a year ago I still found ways of getting around town and traveling to other cities.

The internet payments are a little tricky because I can say I need it for business; there are ways of getting around that. I can live without the internet but it would be difficult for the way of life I have. While I would have argued years ago that cable TV was is the same category as the internet, I am now without cable TV and I’m doing fine. It isn’t something I need to have and with the increasing prices I could remove it and still live a happy life.

I’ve gone through this long list because I am tired of the whining that people have over some creators who release multiple copies of movies. The latest person to incur the wrath of the fans is James Cameron. It has been announced there will probably be at least three versions of AVATAR. The first, coming out in April, will be a bare bones version with no extra scenes or commentary. Around the holidays a second will be released with all the extra stuff and soon after that a 3D version will be out.

You would think the news was similar to the health care debate, considering some of the commentary left on some sites. More often than not the people writing are up in arms, complaining that, like they see the government doing, Cameron is milking as much money as he can from people who can’t afford the DVD. They find it criminal they are being forced to buy 2 or 3 copies of the movie and some vow they will NEVER buy the movie. These are the same people who screamed at Peter Jackson for the multiple releases of the Lord of the Rings, the same folks who scream at George Lucas when another edition of Star Wars comes out.

People, a DVD isn’t food, it isn’t shelter and it isn’t a car payment. A DVD is a luxury item and you can buy it or not buy it. They aren’t taking money out of your wallet. You are the one who is going down and putting down the money to get the DVD. You have the right to say no.

I probably wouldn’t have been too bothered with the responses people gave but the article I saw about the DVD release has only been up 2 hours and there have been three pages of responses. That’s close to 80 responses in two hours, with many of the responses outraged by the system being used. All of that energy for a DVD release that they could rent if they really had to see the movie. What I’m very perplexed about is something I have seen happen in many other things recently. Things that affect us, like health care, unemployment and the like, will get a good stream of comments. I would figure there would be a lot more since it impacts so many people, but I would chalk things up to limited access to the internet, time or some other excuse. When a story like Tiger Woods coming back to golf, Reille Hunter and the GQ magazine shots, Kate Gosling on Dancing with the Stars or a sales structure for the DVD AVATAR, all things that effect very few people, comment pages choke with the amount of responses. Many people care more about ‘issues’ that don’t affect them than the issues that will have consequences for them and their children.