It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

I’m 20 years old and I’m still scared of the news. I wish I could be one of those people who got up every morning and read the newspaper or raced home to watch the evening news, but I’m not. I avoid it. I know that it makes me seem uneducated about current events and the world around me, and I know that it makes me seem immature and apathetic. The problem isn’t that I don’t care. The problem is that I care too much.

I’m not trying to sound noble here. It isn’t noble at all. In fact, it’s horrible to be this way and I wish I wasn’t so scared to feel. You’re supposed to feel, after all, compassion and horror and anger and happiness and all of the emotions the world evokes. Instead, I avoid it. I can’t listen to the stories of violence and misery. I can’t handle the pain. It’s hard enough to deal with the emotions of my life, let alone feel the emotional trials of the rest of the world. I know how selfish that makes me, but if I allowed myself to cry for every troubled soul I read about and see on tv, I would never stop crying. Why must I be such an emotional wreck?

These hurricanes haunt me everywhere I go. I guess they’re supposed to. I get equally worried when I think about them and when I realize I’m not thinking about them. It’s so strange and sad that my life continues onward completely unaltered with the exception of having to pay a little more for gasoline. I swallow down tears every time I hear someone complain about the increasing prices, which happens an increasing amount each day in my house alone. I do have a Jewish father after all. It’s not that I think anyone who complains about it is unsympathetic, it’s just that they can’t seem to make the connection that it could be so much worse. I think gas prices are the least of this country’s problems, but like every situation, America is more concerned with it’s finances than with it’s people.

I think the worst part of my emotional condition is that I tend to get equally annoyed by efforts to help victims. So much of it just seems fake to me, as though it’s more important for people to assume you’re giving than for you to actually be giving. It’s so important obviously to help your fellow man, but that in and of itself should be the reason for helping, and not because you saw your favorite celebrity talking about it on tv. I know that this is neurotic, as the reason behind it really isn’t as important as the victims need for help. I’m sure they really don’t care why you made the donation. It just feels more and more that we exploit these traumatic situations. I’m having trouble believing that anything is genuine, that anyone is selfless, that any of us are safe from corruption. Nothing seems real.

These hurricanes seem surreal. They seem millions of miles and years away from my everyday life. I’ve distanced myself from them as a means of feeling ok. I know it’s awful. I know that I’m a horrible person for it and there’s no justification for ignoring it. I’ve been trying so hard to push the world out of my mind that I’m beginning to internally deteriorate from the repression. Imagine having to leave your home knowing that it will probably never be there to return to. Imagine being separated from your family, not knowing whether they’re dead or alive. Imagine not knowing what your future holds and having your entire past destroyed. How can the world just keep moving?

But it does. Which is why I know I’m not the only one guilty of intentional ignorance. We push these things out of our mind because they’re painful, but it needs to be painful. That’s what it means to be a member of the human race, to feel the pain and beauty of the world. It seems wrong to me to discuss how terrible the condition of the world is the same way we discuss how unseasonably cold it’s been. I would rather weep together, hold one another, grieve for the loss of members of our human family. I would rather grieve for our country, subject to an appallingly inhumane government who continues to fail us time and time again. Was it really a surprise to everyone that George Bush doesn’t care about black people? Could people really not see that until Kanye West pointed it out? Don’t get me wrong, I adore Kanye, but what about the millions of people who have been fighting for years now to prove this very point? Somehow without the exuberant glamour of celebrity status, their opinions become insignificant. I just think it’s sad that we live in a world that has it’s priorities so fucked up. I think it’s sad that I’m guilty of falling into that pattern. I think it’s sad that while a part of me wants to cry and scream and yell, a bigger part of me plants a smile across my face and walks through each day happy in my ignorance. I think it’s sad that I feel fine.