Evan DeFilippis 1

OU Daily Article A Generation Paralyzed

A Generation Paralyzed
Close the blinds, turn the volume up, flip the lights off—gather round the television for
another daily dose of self-imposed oblivion. There’s no learning on the Learning Channel, no
history on the History channel, news channels don’t broadcast news, and MTV doesn’t play
music. Yet, our generation insists on poisoning their sense of reality, domesticating their moral
outrage, and subscribing to what can be described as nothing less than willed ignorance. I can
assure you that such naiveté will bring neither bliss nor safety. Never mind that though, its
entertainment. It makes people laugh, it makes people cry, but most of all its makes people
forget. It makes them forget that there is a reality outside the weekly lineup of comfortable
story lines and familiar characters. It makes them forget that there are problems outside celebrity
scandals and political gossip. And it makes them forget just how intimately connected we are
with the rest of the world. We are all components of a human mosaic that is in dire need artistry.
So set the controller down, it’s going to be a long ride.
I hope that I’m wrong about my sobering analysis of public ignorance, but my
convictions are worryingly confirmed every day: half of us can send a text message in 30
seconds, but agonize over writing essays; we update our twitter feeds with greater regularity than
our reading lists; we spend more time watching ‘reality’ TV then we do actually learning about
reality; we can recite Kanye West’s interruption speech, but can’t even name the first five
presidents of the United States. An allergy to realism has metastasized into a societal epidemic
—we’ve become infected with the dangerous idea that we cannot change the world around us.
We’re incapacitated by fears of our own powerlessness.
Our generation is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet we dedicate our time to
discussing the drama of “The Bachelor” or “Grey’s Anatomy.” Our generation has the
opportunity to pass one of the most comprehensive pieces of health legislation, yet our
generation is silent, its political absence filled by the propagandistic lies of the older ‘birther’ and
‘teabagger’ generations. We've inherited an extinction-level problem of climate change: sea
levels are rising, glaciers are melting, temperatures are escalating, and species are dying, yet we'd
rather debate the existence of global warming than have discussion over solutions.
My question is why? Why is our generation more politically detached, unmotivated, and
apathetic than our predecessors? Why are we complicit with inaction? Why do we blind
ourselves to a world that demands our attention? I believe the answer to these questions lie in
fact that our generation is paralyzed by our own indecisiveness, incapacitated by modernization,
and utterly attention-deficit.
There is a psychological component to our generational apathy. The constant stream of
images that flow from media outlets—depictions of starving Asians, AIDS-plagued Africans,
and war-torn Middle Easterners—all facilitate a resigned sense of hopelessness and despair.
These images are pornography. They satisfy nothing but our sense of voyeurism in that they
show us everything but explain nothing. The inaccurate hyperboles broadcasted by news stations
do nothing but contribute to a sense of powerlessness—they don’t stimulate interest, they don’t
stir sympathy, they don’t evoke change. They only remind us of how fractured and irreparable
the world is; they insist on reminding us just how afraid we should be and just how insignificant
we are. Our compassion is fatigued beyond repair. If we’re un-stimulated by bloated Africans,
they show us emaciation. If that fails to arouse, they show us skeletons. Photoshop in vultures if
that’s not enough. The perversely scandalous is thought of as better that the truth. How can we
fight off all the vultures? How do we feed the starving? How do we end the chaos? How do we
stop the images, mute the cries, and end the videos? Where do we start and where do we go
from there?
When we hear about the plagues in sub-Saharan Africa, the incalculable number of
children who have died from starvation, or the countless innocent men tortured for political
Evan DeFilippis 2
OU Daily Article A Generation Paralyzed

reasons, we feel relieved when we send donate to a non-profit. Although we are fully aware
that these gestures are, like giving Tylenol to the victim of a gunshot wound, futile, we insist on
doing them because we cannot morally justify inaction. Despite our reservations about the
efficacy of our assistance, we do them because they’re convenient. It’s comfortable to click a
link and forget about the suffering. Why should we travel to countries and administer the
vaccines when we can feel good about ourselves by donating “a dollar a day” to save a life. Why
should we care about global catastrophe, when we can absolve ourselves of guilt by giving our
credit-card number to the “right” organization? Why should we educate ourselves with
television when we're only losing a war on three channels but solving mysteries on all the
others? We can’t cope with the magnitude of crises, so we fatalistically resign ourselves to the
convenience of inaction—we smoke more, we drink more, and we relish in the distance that
comfortably mutes the screams of the suffering.
If we do act, it is almost always out of externally-imposed obligation. We embrace
superficial gestures that are just enough to make us feel like we’ve done something, but not
enough to be noticed. We feel “accomplished” by joining a Facebook group. We express our
indignation by updating our Twitter feeds. We cathartically write blog posts and call it a day.
Our complete reliance on technology has co-opted our very ability to act: it has stolen our voices
and replaced it with a status box, it has exchanged our agency with a diminutive profile ‘pic’,
and it has engendered the façade of accomplishment by connecting us with a community of the
sycophantically likeminded. Our youthful passion may persist, but it is perverted and disjointed
by the asymmetry of internet communication. Technology, while making communication
efficient, has decentralized politics, divided our attention, and stimulated inaction.
We don’t need any more updates, we don’t need any more blog posts, and we don’t need
any more amateur journalism. We need to get angry. We need riots, letters to congressmen, and
calls to the White House. We need our students to seek knowledge for knowledge’s sake, to
privilege education over entertainment, and to believe in their own ability to make a difference.
Problems are not intractable, people are not powerless. It is important to understand this. Our
generation will be judged by the decisions we make now and we mustn’t sabotage our legacy to
the future. Wake up America. Stop hitting the snooze alarm. Stop pulling the blanket over your
eyes. Stop deceiving yourself into thinking that everything is okay. And stop thinking that you
can’t change the world.
If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am. It’s because I know that people won’t even be
patient enough to read this far. Congratulations to the people who did, you probably didn’t need
to hear this.