Spring Break
Rebuild optimism with one small-scale effort at a time
Taylor Trudon
Issue date: 4/10/09 Section: Commentary
Last March, 663,000 Americans lost their jobs. On April 3, 14 individuals were shot in Binghamton, N.Y., at an immigrant services center. On Monday, 260 civilians perished as a result of the earthquake that shook L'Aquila, Italy.
Pick up a newspaper or turn on the television, and it seems that the only news that we see is bad news. Tragedy after tragedy continues to make headlines. Bad news is the first thing we hear when we wake up in the morning, and the last thing we hear before we go to sleep at night.
Even though we are constantly surrounded by the knowledge of these horrific events, it is still easy to become emotionally detached from them. I, for one, have not lost my job, and thankfully, nor has anyone in my family. Not only have I never visited Italy before, I also don't know any of the individuals who died from the devastation of the recent earthquake. Whether it is a country as far away as Italy, or the city of Binghamton, which is less than five hours from the UConn, it is safe to say that we, in our little Storrs bubble, remain largely unaffected.
Children are kidnapped, tsunamis destroy cities and unemployment rates are worse than ever. It seems that our brains are now automatically programmed to respond to unfortunate news. We hear about something terrible that has just happened, feel bad for a nanosecond and then we are able to breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn't us. As quickly as a historic town in Italy is able to crumble to pieces, we are able to go back to watching a rerun of "Rock of Love," safe within the comforts of trashy reality television and Bret Michaels' bad hair extensions.
But that's not reality. In reality, we have become immune to the catastrophes of the world. We feel sorry, we commiserate and we climb that bridge known as "I Have My Own Problems To Worry About." We somehow manage to successfully get over it every day. Is it because we truly do not care about what is going on outside the realms of our personal lives, or could it be that we simply feel that we cannot do anything about the all-too-frequent injustices of the world? For the sake of optimism, I'm going to go with the latter.
Pick up a newspaper or turn on the television, and it seems that the only news that we see is bad news. Tragedy after tragedy continues to make headlines. Bad news is the first thing we hear when we wake up in the morning, and the last thing we hear before we go to sleep at night.
Even though we are constantly surrounded by the knowledge of these horrific events, it is still easy to become emotionally detached from them. I, for one, have not lost my job, and thankfully, nor has anyone in my family. Not only have I never visited Italy before, I also don't know any of the individuals who died from the devastation of the recent earthquake. Whether it is a country as far away as Italy, or the city of Binghamton, which is less than five hours from the UConn, it is safe to say that we, in our little Storrs bubble, remain largely unaffected.
Children are kidnapped, tsunamis destroy cities and unemployment rates are worse than ever. It seems that our brains are now automatically programmed to respond to unfortunate news. We hear about something terrible that has just happened, feel bad for a nanosecond and then we are able to breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn't us. As quickly as a historic town in Italy is able to crumble to pieces, we are able to go back to watching a rerun of "Rock of Love," safe within the comforts of trashy reality television and Bret Michaels' bad hair extensions.
But that's not reality. In reality, we have become immune to the catastrophes of the world. We feel sorry, we commiserate and we climb that bridge known as "I Have My Own Problems To Worry About." We somehow manage to successfully get over it every day. Is it because we truly do not care about what is going on outside the realms of our personal lives, or could it be that we simply feel that we cannot do anything about the all-too-frequent injustices of the world? For the sake of optimism, I'm going to go with the latter.
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