It's A Brave New World

This is likely more of an epidemic among the internet generation than among adults in general, but I think it’s still worth discussing.

And for those of you who are hoping to skim down and find the major bullet-points that break down and summarize my article at the same time [don’t feel guilty; I tend to do that, too], there are none. It’s an essay, not a ten-step program.

~

“I used to believe that if I cared about anything,

I would have to care about everything.”

So says Prince Henry in the movie Ever After, one of my all-time favorite adaptations of the legend of Cinderella. For a long while I always thought the remark rather ridiculous; of course one can care selectively about things. Human beings naturally pick favorites. That’s part of why I have so few pairs of shoes; any more and I’d still only wear the ones that I liked, anyway.

But as I merge into a life of adulthood, and as injustice increasingly appears on every screen to vie for my attentions, the more I start to understand what Prince Henry was talking about.

Because more and more catastrophes and moral causes and companies are pushing and shoving to get center-stage in my life and influence me… and the longer I read or watch or listen, the longer I wait… the more I see that many were just fads; scams preying upon the unwary, or misinformed debates that started out fresh but in the end were not as clear-cut as they claimed.

“It takes education and intelligent examination to determine where your dollar goes,” seems to be the observance of many. We hear horror stories about identity theft and businesses that con their customers and politicians that arranged heinous decisions and relief organizations that do more harm than good. We see beggars on the streets and single parents in line for food stamps and orphaned children requesting sponsorship, until we decide that there is only one logical solution to keep from being swindled… and that is to ignore everything.

“Suspicion is the new religion.”

-Switchfoot

Of course, I’m generalizing here. Not everyone has consciously made this decision, but I get the feeling that I’m far from the only person who has. We didn’t come to such a solution immediately, nor is it a choice that I condone. But one day as I scrolled through the world news and daily buzz of my peers, I realized that I was passing over articles on cancer and abductions and terrorist activity because I simply “didn’t want to see them,” and “didn’t want to be fooled” again. I’ve stopped reading all of those “Five Things I Wish I Knew Before I Had A Kid” blog posts with generic instructions that I already knew. I’ve stopped reading those controversial articles that everybody posts or comments on, because they have racy titles meant to draw in readers, like, “I Lost My Virginity Before Marriage And I Don’t Regret It,” which turns out to have some great big positive twist at the end. Not to mention the viral videos with titles the size of Texas, like “This Man Risks His Life To Save A Bear. What The Bear Does Afterwards Is So Touching!”

I’ve grown so sick of faked videos that people claim as real, and I’ve grown sick of the real videos that people accuse of being faked.

I grow angry at people who blindly accept a childish challenge without looking into the stem-cell-based organization that started it, and I grow angry at people who berate the cause instead of trying to find a better organization to donate to.

I grind my teeth at those who treat religious or sexual minorities with prejudiced animosity, and I grind my teeth at those who try to paint the those minorities as underdogs to justify their lifestyles.

We romanticize good and evil when looking back at conflicts like World War II, and we praise those who fought tirelessly to bring down the Third Reich at all costs… yet when Christians in Africa are now being beheaded by ISIS in broad daylight, we hesitate to act because we “could” be taking rash measures.

We obsess over teen movies about distopian societies where freedom has been taken away from the common people, but we forget the eerily-accurate novel Brave New World where people willingly give their freedom away in exchange for pleasure.

Those of us with the means and privilege to live in the modern world are, slowly but very certainly, being led into a gradual state of apathy because bad news has become normal: it’s now just something we ought to grow a callus to. Being hurt by distant tragedies is now an option, not a reality. They’re irrelevant because they’re not happening to us.

But they should be. If every human being is endowed with the same rights and dignity that you and I have, then oughtn’t they to be fought for, tooth and claw, until they receive justice? And if we fail in trying to help, it’s still the thought that counts - but many of us aren’t even bothering with thoughts at all.

“Quid est veritas?”

[“What is truth?”]

-Pontius Pilate, Roman Prefect AD 26-36

When I was in college, I had planned to attend the Kony 2012 march on D.C. to try and influence the government to pay more attention to the act of the LRA, responsible for the abduction of child soldiers and slaves in Africa. For a while it seemed that my schedule would not allow me to attend with my peers… but mere hours before their departure, my docket opened up. We had just enough time to drive to Virginia, attend the march, spend the night, and then drive back the next day. It wasn’t much, but from our point of view, it was all we could do.

Looking back, the march didn’t really seem to do all that much… nor was it totally scam-proof, for that matter. The organization funding it have, to this day, received a lot of flack for a mental breakdown that their leader suffered earlier that year. And while they do still fund efforts to spread “come home” pamphlets to encourage child soldiers to defect, they’re not the most blameless charity around when it comes to financial plans.

But, to be honest… I don’t actually regret going.

Because for one weekend, I felt like I was part of history. I could not only care about a cause, but [try to] do something about it. Of course I learned about the importance of who and what I invest in, but idealism is the privilege of youth. Just because nothing changed that time doesn’t mean that things will never change, even in small degrees. I would rather my heart ache every day at the world’s tragedies than to wake up one day and find out that my heart is no longer capable of breaking because it has grown to hard to feel anything.

Am I suggesting that we give money to every needy person we encounter simply because the sight of their plight makes us feel sorry for them? No. As much as my soul ached every time I saw a cardboard sign during my time in New York City, I knew that handing out anything, even restaurant gift cards, would be a mere band-aid on the bullet-wound of homelessness. Maybe I can’t make a difference that way, but I can find organizations that do function properly to help the homeless that actually want to improve their situation[s], and I can volunteer with them. Maybe I can’t know for sure which charities are truly using their resources wisely overseas, but I can communicate with friends and family who are involved and learn what they’ve experienced in that country and who's helped them the most (I have a nice shortcut in that the brunt of my charity donations can go to my sister's work with European immigrants). Maybe I can’t actually make much of a difference with a Facebook “like” or a blog post like this, but perhaps activism shouldn’t ever be that easy anyway.

In a few decades, I imagine that our children will look back on the horrors that erupted around our world today [not that new ones won’t still be going on]… but unlike some of us, who could brag on our fathers or grandfathers for taking a stand in previous disasters, many of our children will instead hear from us, “We heard rumors about what was happening over there, but we didn’t know for sure.”

“It wasn’t my country/state/city/religion/culture/family, so it wasn’t my problem.”

“I didn’t think it was a big deal at the time.”

But perhaps it is a big deal, and it only seems not to be because we’re watching it unfold on little screens… instead of before our eyes. I know that if half of the world’s disasters happened in my backyard, suddenly I’d be a vocal advocate for justice in the world. So instead of waiting for disaster to strike, perhaps I ought to start caring now.

“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean.

But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”

-Mother Teresa

I don’t know what my next step is from here. I’m still only a college graduate, waiting tables [yes, I think I've got a job now] and waiting for the story of my life to take off. But I’ve spent over twenty years hearing stories of those who gave up so many comforts and riches to help the world distinguish right and wrong. We who are privileged with wealth and education are perhaps those with the most power, if we would but “sell [our] possessions and follow” Jesus where we would rather not go.

Perhaps that’s what I’m supposed to do, or perhaps I was given these talents so that I could change the world with my career of storytelling. I just know I’m ready to do something. Anything. Anywhere.