Extreme Makeover...

Geez, I just watched half of the Extreme Makeover show on TCS and I am saddened. The two people featured were people who had lived their lives ridiculed and insulted by people for their looks and thus wanted so badly to break out of that life that they allowed people to butcher their bodies to escape.
I don't really have anything against plastic surgery. What people do to themselves is totally up to them. But then I was watching the interviews and the two participants banked so much on the power of a makeover to make them better people and I kept thinking that they had spent so much of their lives SO concerned about what other people thought that they'd never actually be happy no matter what they look like.
Narcissism is one of the most powerful and addictive driving forces in the world. Basing one's whole being on how one looks is a downward spiral that can never be fulfilled, and yet people spend their lives trying to fill that hole. We all want to be loved and we all want to be desired and the world holds us hostage with that burning need to fit in. Unfortunately for some, the need becomes all consuming and before you know it, it consumes like a flame.
It's sad when you see someone who's been scarred that badly by unkind remarks that the world heaps on them. The guy on TV said that people had come up to him and asked him how he got through life that ugly...sadly enough, he thought so little of himself that he didn't see it as a problem on the feckless idiot's part, but a problem with himself. The world's cruel and society preys on the weak enough to make people internalise all the loathing placed upon them by all the nutballs out there...and pretty soon, it translates to a hatred of themselves, and no amount of plastic surgery will ever be able to cure that.
Extreme Makeover tries to lead us to believe that they're doing these poor sods a favour by bestowing on them a gift of a new body...but they're just adding a layer of makeup over a very scarred soul.