This title sounds awfully belligerent and I don’t intend to bash stupid people. I’m here to gently chastise smart people for being ignorant. I’m talking mostly about reading the news and being informed, which a large percentage of people neglect to do.
I guess it really shouldn’t bother me that people don’t care to pick up a newspaper or browse the news online. It’s their own loss, not mine. But there’s a reason why media exists, other than profit-making, and other than snoopy people. The media exists because there are some conversations we ought to have as a society, and those conversations should rightfully revolve around events that occur daily. We must take it upon ourselves to be informed about what’s happening in this world because we will inhabit it tomorrow, and unless we understand it (or attempt to) we are doomed to repeat the failures of our fathers.
I’m being a tad dramatic. I guess I can sympathize. I never used to read the news or bother updating myself on current events until my junior year of high school. That’s when it somehow hit me that this was my life and I was living through history and I needed to pay attention to it because yes, I only live once. And yes, I do want to have discussions about David Petraeus and Benghazi and the fact that a few southern states actually signed a petition for secession in light of Obama’s re-election, and that things are really awful in some parts of New Jersey and New York on account of Sandy and our responses to these sorts of disasters are simultaneously heartwarming and upsetting. I want to discuss the fiscal dilemma that we find ourselves in as a nation, and same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization recently–but sometimes I just can’t, because people just don’t know what’s going on around them. I don’t mean to bash anybody who doesn’t read the news, because I understand that everybody’s so wrapped up in their own lives and has difficulty keeping up, but the University sponsors newspaper subscriptions and in the age of digital media where you can receive news updates on your twitter feed, there is rarely an excuse for being misinformed.
Let’s stop being ignorant so we can have a chat–I like coffee, too.
