Sometimes it is easier to read celebrity gossip than to commit yourself to being an educated citizen of the world. I am not referring to the density or readability of news articles, although Perez Hilton’s diminutive vocabulary and drawings are quite comprehensible; instead, I gesture to the state of our world. Volcanoes erupt that we could not predict nor pronounce. Oil spills are not as out of fashion as we assumed, and while hearing about Nashville’s floods, we can’t seem to find any water of our own to shed a few empathetic tears. It is simply too much.
A few months ago, Haiti created a united world of help and hope. The scenes of desperation forced us to open both our hearts and our wallets. However, when the earth decided to keep quaking, it was more than we could nourish. There are only so many charity concerts, so many donations taken from grocery stores, so many t-shirts that can be made. Awareness is trendy, until it can no longer be endured.
We concern ourselves with sustainable resources and sustainable food, but what about sustainable citizens? How do we return from this oversaturation of tragedy? Perhaps this is a microcosm of America’s international involvement. We are at first energized to help, but we run out of inertia and do not know how to return to normalcy. We implicate ourselves and then drown ourselves. At some point, we have to get back to domestic affairs, or in our case, buying school supplies and grocery shopping.
It is much more glamorous to concern ourselves with international problems than domestic. Haiti is a far away land and we can stand by our flag thinking about how such destruction could never happen within our infrastructure. Just as we separate from national problems, oil separates from water. Is the gulf spill over? The BP spokesmen are on an incessant crusade to convince us of such. Is Nashville still destroyed? For that matter, what is going on in New Orleans now that we have hit the five year anniversary of Katrina? Now that the great force of flood has hit Pakistan, how much are we willing to care? Society praises Angelina Jolie for donating $100,000 to a devastated Pakistan. However, instead of donating to them ourselves, we donate our praise by seeing Salt and reading tabloids about her life with Brad Pitt. I don’t know if we are an apathetic society or one who has exceeded its limit to care.
Iraq has become our Novocain. Hearing the updates, death tolls, and casualties has become background music at this point. This July was one of the deadliest months in Iraq that our troops have ever seen. Yet, we have much stronger opinions on LeBron James and Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. Our lives have become a constant state of emergency. Even right now, the holiday weekend hinges on the eve of an unpredictable hurricane. The tropical force of Earl hitting the gulf’s oil is the physical manifestation of our norm: disaster and devastation. Maybe we didn’t start the fire, but we sure as hell can’t stop it.
