Everywhere we look it seems as though the world is filled with apathy. It's not exactly a new thing, but more and more people are separating themselves from everyone else because often times the world is just so overwhelming that it's easier to filter everything. I was watching a television show online so the commercials were limited. During the course of two hours though I was shown that people in third world nations desperately need prosthetic limbs, people everywhere are starving, that majority of Africa is unemployed and wants to work, and autism seems to be on the rise. Now granted among those messages there were commercials for turbo boosted sport utility vehicles and upcoming movies. It seems almost ludicrous that you can have a message about an entire continent that's desperately trying to make enough money to feed itself followed by an ad for a luxury car that had a blu-ray player built in. I'm not saying it's wrong for people to have or want luxury cars, but it kind of forces you have some perspective about the world in general. Then again, most people see either and they immediately tune it out.
Remember what it was like as a kid when there were situations that were just so exciting that you couldn't take it? Or if you have kids today there are those moments when you see them getting so wound up that the crash is going to be ugly. There are times when so much is going on that we simply can't process it all. We try to, but more often than not we reach our breaking point before we're ready to admit it. The thing is that same thing can happen to us as adults. It would be easy to allow the world to overwhelm us with all that's going on. Sure there are a seemingly endless stream of negative things coming at us. On the flip side though there are so many good things out there too that we'd use up all our energy if we tried to keep up with them all. In order to protect ourselves from this onslaught we have to close our eyes to most of it, even if it means turning away from things that we could make a difference in.
I think part of the reason politics are so charged is because they often try to find an issue that cause an immediate reaction. That way people will focus on a singular issue with emotion rather than always with reason. A rational person would understand that any issue has more than one side. Also there may be more than one solution to any given problem. Some politicians feel it's easier to gather support for their view by simply pushing that button rather than digging deeper. And they know that certain things are more important than others. Talk to a group of people who are retired or nearing retirement and mention Social Security in order to get their attention. Want to polarize a group of people against another group of people you just have to focus on something they feel strongly about and heighten the differences between them and their opposition. I personally think everyone should be concerned with education in this country. There are people who don't have kids who couldn't care less about what happens with teacher salary, test scores, or arts in the schools. For them they are more concerned with property taxes or what the government is doing about air quality. Those are legitimate concerns, but it's hard to make them realize that education affects them regardless of if they have kids or not. Guess who is going to be running the country in twenty years? Those same people that had underpaid teachers or standards so low that you'd trip over them. On the other side you may have a teacher who can't be bothered to question why her local government doesn't have a recycling station within fifty miles of their home.
In the computer world there is a thing called processing power, which is essentially the amount of information that can be handled by the computer at any given time. It has a limit and you can't exceed it. If you try then something will have to be put aside for something else. Our minds are very similar in that regard. A person can only concern themselves with so much before it all becomes so overwhelming that either they shut down or something has to be removed from the equation. The thing is no matter how good or bad your life is, we all have problems. When compared to another person they may seem massive or trivial, but they are our problems. Add to our own problems those of our loved ones. You could take on the concerns of your significant other or children or siblings. Once you have all that add on those other outside issues that concern you. Millions of chickens are being slaughtered for our consumption and yet the food we eat is becoming so processed that one has to wonder what we're really eating at this point. Gasoline prices are rising rapidly and no one seems to have a clear grasp on a reasonable alternative, meaning that within the next twenty years industry as we know it may either collapse or have to drastically change based on new needs. Medical care in this country is becoming so expensive and depersonalized that it's easy to imagine that no matter how well off you are now, it would only take a prolonged illness to wipe out everything you've worked for so that you could be forced to chose between paying for medication or food. For someone each of those issues is very important and that's only an example of what's out there. So it becomes easy to see how apathy takes hold. As Somerset said "Apathy is the solution. I mean, it's easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life. It's easier to steal what you want than it is to earn it. It's easier to beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs: it takes effort and work."
So how do we not close ourselves to the world and at the same time not open ourselves up so much that we lose ourselves instead? Maybe life is a lot like the salad buffet, where you pick and choose the things that are most important to you and hope that while you're fighting for the cure to cancer that someone else is fighting just as hard for clean air. No single one of us can fix everything and that often leads us to believe that the problems are too big for us to even look at. I know that if I throw away a plastic bottle rather than recycle it, it's not going to make or break the planet. I know that my vote may not decide who the next President is. That doesn't mean I should just throw my hands in the air and say that nothing I do matters because I'm such a small part of a larger world. I may not be able to fix the world's problems on my own, but when we stop trying and only care about ourselves then we've truly failed and given into the weight of the world.
