Nearly half a million are dead in Ukraine, but how can I care about a war thousands of miles away when my favorite restaurant is shutting down? That’s the question of the day, perhaps the question of the century. 24 hour news cycles relay a never ending stream of controversy and brutality. It makes sense that people seem to lose track of, and lose interest in the various happenings around the world. As Americans, we have a unique position. We inject ourselves in global conflicts, form strong opinions about things that will never affect us directly. It can be easy to trivialize a war when our lives aren’t at stake. One minute we’re passionate activists, the next minute we’re consumed by our first world problems. American citizens exist in a bubble. A bubble that has been years in the making. We have been trapped in a pattern of distraction. And it seems as though people prefer it that way. This phenomenon is apathy, or a lack of enthusiasm and concern, and this is something I believe plagues America.
The pendulum swings from excitement to apathy. This phenomenon has often been attributed to American media. The blame cannot be entirely laid upon traditional news broadcasting. Internet spaces can also be blamed for Americans shrinking attention spans. The discussion of America’s attention deficit is not exactly recent, or niche. It’s considered by many that over the years that our ability to stay on a single long-form piece of media without getting bored has diminished. However, the biggest issue isn’t our boredom, or our attention spans. The big issue is how those things often translate into apathy.
It’s odd to think of that way, because our media seems to present world affairs with vehement fervor. Sensationalized headlines, and a new topic, controversy, and in some cases global conflict every single day. It doesn’t feel like people don’t care, sometimes it can feel like we care too much about the countless happenings going on on a daily basis. We care about who marries who, who got exposed now and what in the world happened in politics this time? Yet, our memory is short. We tend to forget, because we stop caring. Americans are plagued by apathy.
Consider this when you read this article. When was the last time you thought about Dr. Disrespect allegations? When would have been the last time you thought about the crimes of Sean “Diddy” Combs? When would have been the last time you thought about larger, globally significant topics like the wars in Ukraine, or Gaza? How many Americans know about the Uyghurs in Northwestern China, or any of the thousands of other things going on across the world? The fast paced nature of our media, presenting topic after topic makes it easy to forget. Too quickly do we take sides on atrocities that don’t affect us, divide ourselves on topics that we don’t fully understand then forget about it a month later. All the arguments, and hot bloodedness being cast off to the wayside. Until the next controversy comes up. The hurricane that just wiped out your family? It’s a headline that lasts a day. The war that took your son from you? Nobody is even talking about that anymore.
Is it our fault that we don’t care? Is it the complete fault of the media, or our fault that we can’t stick with something? Perhaps, it’s the fault of no-one, and everyone, or it’s just a fact of how societies work. Though, in the end it’s simply something that we’ll never think about again, because we are apathetic, because why should I care about some tragedy across the world, when my favorite restaurant across the street just closed down. Though in the end, for what it’s worth, that restaurant was pretty good.
