Apathy: A Generations Poison of Choice

The economy may be 'recovering' unfortunately I don't feel that I can say the same about the American psyche. Apathy and indifference still runs strong. The fires of social progression that fueled generations before has long since burned out.

The baby boomer generation dreamed of the days when they would have the power. When radical ideas, compassion and understanding, and social unity would rule the world. Many a bearded man in tune with the 'universal consciousness' lay in dream of the utopia his baby boomer brethren would bring about when their time came. A dream lost in a multicoloured sea of rock and roll and psychedelics.

Their time has come and passed. Their generation brought about one of the best world leaders and one bar far of the worst... of course far be it from me to name names. Though Suffice it to say that both of them are to blame for the situation of the world as we find it now. Some good, Some bad

January 20, 2009 America experienced its first tastes of hope in almost a decade. One year hence, where are we? Where is the change that we were promised?

Patience is a virtue... So they say, and unfortunately we've all come to believe. Apathy is today's poison of choice. People have chosen to be comfortable in their misery. For a brief moment in late 2009 the American population was discontented enough to stand up and vote for 'change.' Riots of hope and promise spread though the land. A wave of hope was enough to elect Mr. Obama in the oval office. That wave quickly broke and rolled back into the ocean of American unconscious.

Nothing has changed. Politics is still politics. There has been no grand revolution on the hill. Hell half the senate still believe that even people with little means should be left to help themselves. These are people from a time when people believed in camaraderie and hope. People with the means and the power to make it a reality and they don't. Beyond that they could and they choose not to.

Patience is a virtue. Patience has become synonymous with apathy the great poison of our times. We sit, and we wait. We're waiting for someone to come and fix everything; waiting for a superhero. Action has become a way of the past. "All that hippie shit is for the sixties." We hide behind computer screens, cell phones, and ipods as socially anti-social as inhumanly possible. Conversation and original thought have becoming dying art forms. The world is more interconnected than ever and yet we all seem so far apart.

Technology has replaced religion as the opiate of the people. We distract and placate ourselves with the wonders of the modern world. Even know I sit in a crummy apartment with a horrible day job writing on a laptop listening to music coming over my high speed internet watching Family Guy coming via digital cable. The majority of Americans work 8 (or so) hours a day for near minimum wage coming home with barely enough energy to lift the remote. The modern American working man is kept overworked and underpaid to the point that he or she is completely subdued. Like ants in an ant farm we go about our business doing what we have to do to get by with little or no regard to the outside world (or most of our own world for that matter).

I don't propose a solution. I don't have one. Anyone who does is lying. Politicians and religious figures only exist to push their own personal agendas even the newest political ubermensch Obama. There are no grand solutions. All I have to say is this:

Do what you have to do to better your own situation, try to help others if you can, and remember... shit happens. No grand superhero is going to pull the world out of the rut that it is in. If you want a better world work for.