Why is our generation so willfully ignorant? It is not productive to be apathetic and uninterested. You need to stand up for what you believe in. How do you expect people to believe in you if you can’t even actively stick up for yourself? In comparison to generations before us, we have accepted this sedentary lifestyle. We have grown up in an era where we can achieve more with less effort.
Senators and congressmen are continually passing legislation that takes from us in some form. Yet it is we, the people, who put them in power and it is up to us to stand up for these inadequacies. They are directly putting us at a disadvantage and we do not even know their names.
Think about the college-aged students of the 70s, they were burning their draft cards and marching on Washington when they felt like the government was f*cking them over. What do we do now? We tweet and retweet and flock to our Facebook statuses, thinking we are acting as political activists.
We are raising future generations who are great at sending messages, but are inept at communicating. We lack the ability to communicate with people face to face, to express those opinions in the streets, not just on a blog -- to have a conversation to a person’s face, to express dissatisfaction with something in real life, not secretly tweeting it behind a phone screen.
“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is sh*t-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no,' we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
We don’t give a sh*t about our jobs, we only take them to pay our bills and other expenses. We are an apathetic generation. We are all smart, capable and for the most part have earned some sort of higher educational degree. Job opportunities are slim and it more important now more than ever before to fight hard for these opportunities.
Instead of working hard, we accept the reality and settle; people take jobs as waitresses or work in cubicles with the idea that “oh well this is the economy, this is all I can do.” Everyone just accepts the bare minimum, unwilling to put forth the extra effort.
Why are we the most educated generation, but by far the most ignorant? Instead of waking up and reading the newspaper in the morning, we wake up and read what people tweeted while we were asleep. We demand and expect instant gratification in every aspect of our lives. Due to the inflation of technology, we live our lives through the Internet, our cell phones and social media.
We have proven ourselves to be a generation largely spoiled and defined by greed and laziness. Our grandparents endured the Great Depression, WW2, Vietnam, the Korean War and both desert conflicts. They built this country with a mentality, capturing strong work ethic, discipline and loyalty to one's country and family.
If we are to make any impact in the world close to what they did, we must look to the past, change in the present and deviate from our current path of mediocrity.
This is surely not indicative of the entire generation, but there does seem to be an overwhelming number of people who embrace concepts like “the Iraq war sucks” and “global warming is a problem,” without ever trying to dig deep and investigate the political, economic and social motivations behind the government and corporate actions.
Photos via Tumblr
