Morning coffee and hot news to go with it, and I was not complaining. Like all the ‘enlightened’ (educated and aware of the world affairs so to speak), I preferred my coffee with a newspaper. As I sat down at my desk after checking in early for work, it seemed like any other day, except that half of Asia was rocked by a quake. It should have jolted us back to life, perhaps it should have signaled in the least an after-thought. But then what qualifies as ‘hot news’?
I prefer to steer clear of alleging the press as the culprit, since when did we become passive enough to not realize the extents of our passivity. What is the deal with apathy, I asked myself. For all the glorious promises of democracy and liberty, I am wondering if we ever made past our obsession with ‘progress’. Scientific and technological prowess seems to have been achieved at the sheer expense of liberty. We have become slaves to our own ambitions, seeking better things, progressively more efficient things all the time. This should have empowered us to make life better, that which we set out to seek in the first place. In a way we have reached that place, we have become insular human beings, life is better now simply because we don’t see beyond the confines of our world. Shrinking world indeed, it’s only our life-simplifying technologies and us in the small bubble.
When I stopped to wonder the most powerful emotion that spells unhappiness, and paves way for action, I stumbled on- helplessness. Oppression made natives helpless, sovereignty was born of it, injustice, and power caused helplessness and the solution was war. If technology made us self-reliant perhaps it has achieved what it set out to. What is it I am complaining about? Precisely the fact that we don’t feel helpless anymore is the root of apathy. Our worlds are secured with so many layers of padding that for all we care, the rest of the world could be living in a mental asylum confronting their individual realities.
There are no easy answers, as there are no DIY solutions. Like faith simplifies life, the only way out seems to be leaving some questions out at bay. Coming back to our simple lives, why is the hot news always good on the platter? The explanation of cursory concern seems insufficient to explain the ubiquity of sensationalistic press. Maybe we are not that apathetic at all, we read the hot news to assure ourselves of the security of our own bubble, or perhaps it’s the assurance given to our competitive flair- of being the fittest, of being the survivor. I might be jumping the gun here, or maybe I have hit the bull’s eye. I will let the reader figure that out over his own cup of coffee. After having condemned the life-simplifying technologies, it would be rather inconsistent of me to supply a perfectly tailored answer for you to assimilate.