Since starting my college government class, the staggering realization that a lot of kids (if you can even say kids, I turn eighteen this year) my age don’t care about politics has hit me like a ton of bricks.
And even then, it doesn’t start there—a lot of us don’t even seem to care about the history and values that lead to the social issues. We’re so biased in our level of privilege that a lot of this group tends to ignore anything from beyond the confines of our own city, let alone state, country, world.
There are people I know who can’t accurately identify Mussolini by name alone, don’t understand that slavery ‘ended’ but never really ended, and those who don’t understand that what’s going on in Palestine is nothing new—and even those who are aware don’t understand that that isn’t the only ethnic or genocidal cleansing we’re watching unravel.
The undoing of a country is devastatingly common, from Congo, to Sudan, to Haiti. We watch nations devolve into impoverished states with weak infrastructures of economy, and then move on.
Isn’t that alarming? That people have died, been dying, and will die, and some people don’t care. At all.
There are individuals that will repeat that our voices should be heard, but only in the context of a U.S. election—what about voices for those you won’t ever get to speak to? Those whose voices are actively being snuffed out. Those who might not live to find that voice again.
We’re all so quick to say that we would never be complicit and complacent in these major world events, when we talk about slavery or the holocaust.
But Rory Gilmore from Gilmore Girls spoke of the same events, the same oppression people are still choosing to ignore, almost twenty years ago.
And sure, to some it’s overwhelming to throw yourself into the deep end when your school system doesn’t give you this information, and you have to find it on your own. But even within the state, we remain ignorant.
Over the past three years, I feel like I’ve taken stances that are surface level. The-Crash-Course -with-John-Green-video versions of social and political issues, polarized topics, ideals that the average Texan would contest or sneer at, from gun control to cultural appropriation, to abortion. And even then, it feels as though I’m only scratching the surface of a wealth of knowledge.
We shouldn’t have to wait to be provoked to look into how we can improve the world we live in, or at the very least, know about it. Politics, ‘being woke’, and empathy for anyone beyond ourselves shouldn’t have to be a chore, or a big deal. It should be a given.
Because again, this is nothing new. Any amount of research could tell you that—or even a look at International Insight puts the world into perspective a little more. We could all stand to care more. Care before we have to be guilt tripped, care before it’s too late to do so.
