Apathy

So last night I had a very long talk with my roommate about politics and current events that was very enlightening. I thought about how much I watch the news and how invested I am in politics, and realized in my generation I am the minority. Now a days students (specifically college) are more concerned with what's going on with their favorite celebrities then what's going on in politics, economy and such. They consider watching E! or TMZ watching the news, and where I am like many guilty of watching those programs (and reading perez hilton's website) I balance it out with watching the news. Then you have the students that watch the news, read the paper and such, but they only read ONE paper, and only watch ONE station. This isn't good either. You have to get every side of the story. My ritual in the morning, is while getting ready I watch Fox News, flip in between that and CNN/HLN (this is of course unless the Boy Meets World episode that is on is one of my favorites), then when I get to work after checking my email, I read the headlines on foxnews.com, cnn.com, msnbc.com and washintonpost.com (which I mostly look at to get my daily dose of the comics). This way I get to see all points of view of the headlines so I have as much information about a subject. Then if someone brings up the subject and can give them my opinion based on all the knowledge I've gathered on the subject and I can back up my stance.



The problem with doing all this, well a lot of people don't really seem to care about the issues. I miss working on Capital Hill where everyone was paid to know what was going on in the world and especially with politics. Now it's even worse. Living in an apartment complex where the majority of it's tenants are students, who have shut their brains off over the summer, don't want to sit down and have intelligent conversations about current events and political candidates. So I usually result to calling up my mom and having hour long converstations about that stuff. But I miss debating people. I want to have a meaningful conversation with someone who doesn't agree with me so i can get their viewpoint and they can get mine. Over the school year it's easier to do this since I can talk to Professors and debate them. Of course I picked a major (anthropology) which tries to stay away from politics so it's hard to have conversations with my classmates and profs that aren't about the new archeological or anthropological studies.

Now obviously I can't force people to be like me (even though sometimes I really wish I could) so all I can do is keep people in the know about these things and hope that it sparks their interest. Then I hope that they go out on their own and read the paper, or watch the news.